marx on religion

MARX ON RELIGION

Temple University Press

PHIL ADELPHIA

Edited by John Raines

MARX ON RELIGION

Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122Copyright © 2002 by Temple UniversityAll rights reservedPublished 2002Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paperfor Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marx, Karl, 1818–1883.[Selections, English. 2002]Marx on religion / edited by John Raines.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 1-56639-939-4 (alk. paper) — ISBN 1-56639-940-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883—Religion. 2. Religion—Controversial literature. I. Title: Marx on religion. II. Raines, John C. III. Title.

B3305.M74 M35513335.4'092—dc21

2001053179

v

CONTENTS

Preface vii

Introduction 1

PART I THE YOUNG MAN MARX 15

“Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation” (1835) 17Letter to His Father: On a Turning-Point in Life (1837) 20The Leading Article of No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung (1842) 28“On the Jewish Question” (1843) 44

PART II CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MATERIAL WORLD 71

“Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy” (1844) 75“The German Ideology—Ideology in General” (1844–46) 93“The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism” (1844) 101Preface: “A Contribution to the Critique of Political 107

Economy” (1859)

PART III BAD WORK/GOOD WORK 113

Preface, “Early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” 115(1844)

“Estranged Labor” (1844) 117“Private Property and Communism” (1844) 128“Money” (1844) 139The Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1) (1848) 143“Money and Alienated Man” (1844) 154Capital, Book 1 (extract) (1867) 163

PART IV THE CRITICISM OF RELIGION 167

“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844) 170“Concerning Feuerbach” (1845) 182“Social Principles of Christianity” (1847) 184

PART V OCCASIONAL WRITINGS 187

Marx“The Decay of Religious Authority” (from New York Tribune) 188

(1854)Excerpts from Grundrisse (1858) 193Excerpts from Capital (1867) 195

Engels 203The Peasant War in Germany (Chapter 2) (1850) 203On the History of Early Christianity (1895) 217

Personal Letters 237Letter from Jenny Marx to Johann Philipp Becker (1866) 237Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels (1864) 238Letter from Karl Marx to Ferdinand Domela 239

Nieuwenhuis (1881)

Study Guide for Students 241

vi Contents

vii

PREFACE

Most of the writings of Karl Marx concerning religion are groupedclosely in the years between 1844 and 1849. It makes little sense,

therefore, to list them chronologically. I chose, instead, to group them accord-ing to various topics. In deciding which writings to include, I took those inwhich Marx directly addresses religion. In addition, I included writings whereMarx was working out his philosophical position of dialectical materialism inopposition to Hegel (whom he called “a theologian”). Also, his major essayson the nature of human work are important because they display for Marx thepathway of what he considered to be our human self-evolution. Finally, Iadded some very early and other occasional writings that let the reader get afeel for Karl Marx as a person. The two essays by Engels, one on early Chris-tianity and the second on the Peasant War in Germany, add an important his-torical dimension.

MARX ON RELIGION

1

Introduction

K arl Marx wanted to dedicate his masterpiece, Capital, toCharles Darwin. But the Darwin family prevented it because they didn’t wanttheir names associated with the famous social radical. Still, Marx shared withDarwin the same intellectual passion—to understand a world that had sud-denly become mysterious.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, missionaries and naturalistswere sending home to London and to Paris the most extraordinary descrip-tions of the diversity of life on planet Earth. It was an unintended effect of Euro-pean colonialism. Their sketches and specimens had to be cataloged for even-tual public display. The natural history museum was being born, and thatmeant an immense effort at sorting out this astonishing variety of life into somerational pattern, classifying and arranging specimens side by side so that theycould be presented as a visual narrative on the museum floor. It required anunderstanding of what you were trying to display.

Simultaneously, the geologists were vastly expanding the notion of thelength of time life had existed on Earth, making space in our intellectual imag-ination for the idea of gradual but enormous change. The fossil record wasfull of evidence of such change. While climbing in Chile, Darwin found at ten

1

2 Introduction

thousand feet the fossil remains of simple life-forms that had once flourishedat the bottom of the sea. And the fossil record showed a single direction—fromsimple to ever more divergent and complex life-forms. Vast time and vastchange over time opened the door for the theory of life evolving, and ourhuman life as part of that larger story.

Both Darwin and Marx saw what it meant: Humans belong to this earth. Thisis where we were born and grew and evolved. As Darwin had found the keyto unlock the mystery of natural evolution, of how the incredible diversity oflife on Earth came to be, so Marx sought to understand the pattern and logicof human evolution in society. Like philosophers before him, what Marx founddistinctive about the human animal is our acute degree of self-reflectiveness.He saw this human consciousness as an unfolding process, the result of ourcontinuing interaction with our material environment.

For Marx we are, like all other animals, sensuous and tactile creatures. Self-awareness is our species’ way of being in touch with that reality. And the con-tents of consciousness are a result of that continuing interaction. The engineof that interaction is human work. It is what Marx called our “species being.”Work is far more than what we do “to make a living,” although that is howmost of us think of work today. Human living is not something we “make”but something we do. And for Marx, as a species we do our living in an activeway, transforming the material world we live in through our use of tools. Thehuman is the tool-using animal; it is our species-specific characteristic. At firstthis may seem like crass reductionism, but hold that judgment until you seewhat he means.

By using tools we transform the material environment upon which wedepend for our survival, and in the process we transform ourselves. We firsttransform ourselves biologically. Marx’s friend, Friedrich Engels, wrote a fas-cinating essay on the human thumb.1 Today we know that the opposablethumb evolved simultaneously with the higher brain or neocortex; archaeo-logical evidence shows a simultaneous expansion and diversification of thetypes and uses of tools. Tools put an evolving human thumb together with anevolving human neocortex, each feeding the other in a positive feedback sys-tem that became our species’ survival wager. We evolved as a species thatwould survive on the basis of consciousness interacting with tools. But it isnot just our biology that changes over time. Human work transforms society,our everyday way of life with others, and with that our religious and philo-sophical ideas change. For Marx, the final product of our human work is our-selves as a working, thinking, still-evolving species.

Marx, like Darwin, is not simply a scientist but also a moralist, one whoboldly paints in the dots that reveal the picture of the larger human drama, and

what it implies for our place and action within that drama. And like Darwin,Marx saw this picture energized by struggle. For Darwin, individuals within onespecies compete with one another for food to survive, and species dependingupon the same food supply compete with one another. For Marx, differentsocial classes in history have competed with one another to gain control overthe surplus of their common labor. Master against slave, lord against serf, guildmaster against apprentice and, in our day, capitalist against worker—what thepast shows us, Marx said, is that history is “the history of class struggles.”2

True, looked at in one way the division of labor is the story of an evolv-ing and ever more complex form of human cooperation. Marx understood thatand called it “the social powers of production.” He was quite willing to admitthat capitalism had energized a veritable explosion of productive capacity.Still, this cooperation in the division of labor is time and again co-opted toserve the interests of the privileged class. Everything is drawn by power intothis politics of class domination. Indeed, consciousness itself—our ideas aboutthe world, about the good and the beautiful, our hopes and dreams and enviesand fears—all are drawn into the class struggle, but secretly, and without ournoticing it. Marx called this “false consciousness,” when class inequalities cometo be seen as the intention of the gods, or the legacy of karma, or, morerecently, the result of alleged individual merit. About these ideas that justifypower and privilege, Marx said, “The ruling ideas of an era are ever the ideasof its ruling class.”3 Ideas have the power to rule, and they do so with moresubtlety, and therefore with more effectiveness, than guns.

But we must keep these insights in their proper order. For Marx the toolsymbolizes first and above all else vast human collaboration over time. Theunfolding human story is the story, yes, of struggle, but even more it is thestory of gifts passed down, refined, and made more elaborate through thegenerations. It is the legacy of human work embedded in tools. Take the exam-ple of human hammering devices. The earliest were most likely a stone and astick. Each had its advantages. The stone would not break when striking some-thing solid like wood. And the stick would add length and therefore torqueto the human arm. For hundreds of thousands of years the stick and the stonewere all we had, but then came a moment of tremendous creativity. With theinvention of the stone ax we combined the advantages of both poundingdevices.

Or take another example, the history of magnification. The earliest magni-fying tool was probably a stone that had been accidentally heated by a fire,which altered its internal organization. Undoubtedly it became an object of reli-gious worship because it carried powerful mysteries within it. It could trans-form sun into fire. As the story of magnification continued, after thousands of

Introduction 3

generations our predecessors at the great workbench of humanity would dis-cover the art of glass-making, of grinding and of making lenses. And not longafter that they would put one lens in front of another, and still another . . . andproduce the telescope.

This new tool, the telescope, brought us miracles we did not find at allcomforting. Forced by the Catholic Church to recant his hypothesis aboutEarth moving around the Sun, Galileo muttered under his breath, “neverthe-less it moves.” And three hundred years later—a mere tick of the clock ashuman evolution counts time—the large optical telescopes of the 1930s and1940s would show us that many of the stars (suns) of our Milky Way werenot stars in our galaxy at all but were instead galaxies of their own, each withits millions of suns. And with that we had to start to rewrite all our cosmolo-gies, all our stories of creation, all our religious ideas about the place of humansin the universe. The tool called magnification rendered our older myths—thecontents of our consciousness—not so much wrong as no longer able to guideus. It was not, as the newspapers announced at the time, that man had “con-quered space,” but that space (in its immensity!) had invaded and (pre)occu-pied our human mind. Today, we have seen our small and fragile planet—ourspecies’ home—from the perspective of the moon. And suddenly the moralprescriptions that have guided human behavior—prescriptions about domi-nation and power and ever-expanding growth—are rendered obsolete, andeven dangerous.

What we have pictured to us here is the vision of Karl Marx, the human-ist, in dialogue with that other great storyteller of his time, Charles Darwin.Like the Hebrew prophets before him, Marx was driven by a passion for truthand for justice. And justice could not be confined to distributive justice or tothe established practices of law (“procedural justice”). The question of justicewas lodged in and had to address our species being, our fundamental way oflife. It had to address, in short, the organization and control of human labor.In his quest for justice Marx discovered that the master tool of the modernworld was money. The human tool called money had come to organize theinteraction of all other tools and the social relations of the division of labor.

Beginning three hundred years ago with people like John Locke and AdamSmith a new vision came to possess the minds and hearts of the West—or atleast the elites of the West. It was the vision of endlessly expanding marketsbreaking beyond the old limits of face-to-face barter. With money, not onlywould markets expand to incorporate wider and wider populations and thushugely diversify the division of human labor, but competition among the pro-ducers would force producers to diversify their product line. Now new andundreamed-of satisfactions became possible. The old, one kind of apple would

4 Introduction

be replaced by apples for immediate eating, or different apples for winter stor-ing, or still different apples to cook in pies or to make applesauce. The pic-ture of human desires, of possible human satisfactions began to expand underwhat seemed a limitless horizon. Today, we call this the Capitalist Revolution.

In our day this revolution has reached the farthest corners of the earth.The tool of money has produced the miracle of the new global market and theubiquitous shopping mall. Read The Communist Manifesto, written more thanone hundred and fifty years ago, and you will discover that Marx foresaw itall. And his criticism of what he foresaw in that document, which was evenmore forcefully inscribed in his essay on Estranged Labor, should lead us to seri-ous reflections upon how we conceive of human work in the twenty-first cen-tury. According to Marx, when people no longer control their tools, they nolonger control their own destiny. When we collectively let our tools be organ-ized by the logic of global financial markets, we have let an alien “god” takeover our continuing human journey. And that journey is the journey of humanwork, the final product of which is our own still-evolving species.

Like the Hebrew prophets of old, Marx knew that to speak of social jus-tice we must become socially self-critical, and that means becoming critical ofthe ruling powers—whether they be kings or priests or investment bankers.Power and privilege in society always disguise their own arbitrariness behindthe facade of fair play, which may be called providence or karma or stan-dardized test scores. Whatever basis is used to claim an objective and unbi-ased perspective, such claims need critical analysis and challenge. For Marx,all ideas are relative to the social location and interests of their production.And like the prophets before him, the most revealing perspective is not fromthe top down or from the center outward, but the view of “the widow and theorphan”—the point of view of the exploited and the marginalized. Sufferingcan see through and unveil official explanations; it can cry out and protestagainst the arrogance of power.

And this brings us to how Marx viewed religion. When we think aboutMarx and religion the first thing that comes to mind is his famous statement,“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” That is, we tend of think that Marx hada monolithically negative view of religion. But that is not the case. Immedi-ately preceding this language of the “opiate” we find the following: “Religioussuffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and aprotest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.”4 Here Marxrecognizes in religion an active moral agency, especially for the deprived anddespised. Religion is not simply the ideological expression of the powerful,legitimating the social hierarchy—as in the case, for example, of singing hymns

Introduction 5

with the hidden message that as there is a “King in Heaven” so there shall andshould be kings on earth. No, for Marx in the hands and voices of the poorand exploited religion is “protest”: It is a crying out against “real suffering,”not illusory sufferings such as fear of punishment from the gods or sufferingscaused by some “impurity” inherited from a previous incarnation.

The most important reflections of Marx on religion are found in his strug-gle to understand the nature and origin of human self-awareness. In that strug-gle his primary dialogue partner is the philosopher Hegel. Marx claims thathe found Hegel standing on his head and corrected Hegel’s idealist philoso-phy by putting him back on his feet, using a materialist critique. In a remark-able quotation, Marx puts together the ideas of “consciousness,” “sensuous-ness,” and “suffering.” Here is what he said:

Imagine a being which is neither an object itself nor has an object. In the firstplace, such a being would be the only being; no other being would exist out-side it, it would exist in a condition of solitude. For as soon as there are objectsoutside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another, a reality other than the objectoutside me. For this third object I am therefore a reality other than it, i.e. itsobject. A being which is not the object of another being therefore presupposesthat no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has mefor its object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous, merelythought, i.e. merely conceived being, a being of abstraction. To be sensuous, i.e.to be real, is to be an object of sense, a sensuous object, and thus to have sen-suous objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sense perception. To be sensu-ous is to suffer (to be subjected to the actions of another).5

Marx is arguing against Hegel here. Consciousness or self-awareness requiresthe material world as the over against (“the object”) in relationship to which webecome, in effect, a perspective thrown back upon our own perspective. Suchself-awareness is always a sensuous relationship, not a mere abstraction. It is atactile relationship responding to the concrete material world. That is not aneasy intimacy, however. It involves suffering and struggling because con-sciousness, in opposing itself to the givenness of the world, opposes itself towhat seems the finality and inevitability of that world. It reaches out from thealready in passionate longing for the not yet. Marx goes on:

Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and becausehe feels his suffering [Leiden], he is a passionate [leidenschaftliches] being. Pas-sion is man’s essential power vigorously striving to attain its object.6

What Marx objected to in Hegel was Hegel’s idealism: Man is most him-self when involved in the activity of critical consciousness—consciousness thathas returned to itself from any external action and come to rest within itself

6 Introduction

as a critical perspective upon its own action. It’s a kind of aristocracy of sep-aration and distance. For Marx, this was not only elitist, it was a denial of thesensuous, active and therefore real human being. For the real human being isnot thought but praxis—thought engaging itself by engaging its activity in theworld. If that seems abstract think of the tool and the thumb, and how it wasonly in relation to those that we evolved the higher brain or neocortex. Theminded creature is not some lonely abstraction squatting outside the world,calculating its self-interests or admiring its critical sophistication. Marx seeshumans as fundamentally embodied, not as a spirit trapped in a body. Indeed,for Marx, we are a body inside of another body.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the grasp Marx had on our life assensuous beings is his understanding of our relationship to nature. It is partof his understanding of human reality that opens his thoughts to a radical per-spective on the environmental question. Marx did not explore these issuesbecause at the end of the nineteenth century they had not yet become evident.Like others, Marx thought of nature as able to support an indeterminateamount of growth in human productive activity. Today, we know that is nottrue—although we have yet to discipline our activity to that reality. Never-theless, as the following quotation makes clear, Marx understood that natureis our second body, and that we live only by staying in constant touch withthat larger body:

Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the humanbody. Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a con-tinuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and men-tal life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for manis a part of nature.7

Notice that word “dialogue.” It is our species’ specific way of being in, with,and of nature. We are conscious in our life activity, involved in a conversation,and in that sense enjoy (and also are responsible for) a freedom that other ani-mals in their life activity do not have. Marx put it this way:

The animal is immediately one with its life activity, not distinct from it. Theanimal is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself into an object of willand consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination withwhich he immediately identifies. . . . Only on that account is his activity freeactivity. Alienated labor reverses the relationship in that man, since he is a con-scious being, makes his activity, his essence, only a means for his existence.8

We all have two bodies—although many of us think we have only one,our inside-the-skin body. We hold onto that body, sometimes quite desper-ately, because it seems to offer us our only hold on life. Our inside-the-skin

Introduction 7

body distinguishes and separates us. It makes us humans and not fish. Itmakes us male or female, black or white or in between. It locates us as mem-bers of this nation and not another one. It makes us here and not there, nowand not then. It borders us (and concerning these boundaries innumerablewars have been fought).

But each of us has another body, and it is a body we all share. It is even morecrucial to our life than our private or individual body. It is our outside-the-skinbody from which, as Marx saw, we constantly draw our life. We breathe; we takein food and water. We see; we smell; we touch and taste and feel. Indeed, weare very much like the amoeba: We are engaged in a constant process of osmo-sis, a passing back and forth between our inside and our outside.

In our unique species’ freedom we have become unfree. Today most of us workbecause that is how we “make a living.” For Marx that is an expression of alien-ated work. Work, the way we evolve ourselves as an unfinished species, hasbeen reduced to a mere means of our individual survival. Instead, “The objectof labor is the objectification of man’s species life: he produces himself not onlyintellectually, as in consciousness, but also actively in a real sense and con-templates himself in a world he has made.”9

It is a striking phrase, to contemplate ourselves in a world we have made.Culture is a product of human labor, and culture is the master tool by whichwe put ourselves in touch not just with each other but also in dialogue withnature. Culture, as an unfinished product of our work, is our extended bodythat inserts us into the body of nature in culturally specific ways. It is impor-tant to see ourselves in this activity and not be swallowed as if embedded insome finished reality or inevitability. As a species living in the already, we aredirected toward the not yet. And this issue of transcendence and freedomreturns us once again to the question of religion.

Remember, for Marx the essence of religion is its voicing of “suffering”—its crying out against the realities of exploitation and degradation. And as wehave just seen, the essence of being human is a passionate suffering, a strug-gle to take back into our hands a world we have made but which is then takenaway from us. Why then, since our species’ life is precisely one of suffering,does Marx in the end reject religion? Because, as he said, “The abolition of reli-gion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real hap-piness. To call them to give up their illusions about their conditions is to callon them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion istherefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is thehalo.”10

8 Introduction

This conclusion, I think, reflects the religious practices Marx knew and sawaround him—the practices of state religion, Lutheranism in Germany and theChurch of England in Great Britain. Had Marx experienced the religious prac-tices, say, of the African-American slaves in the United States he might havecome to a less one-sided conclusion. Let us consider one of the “songs of suf-fering” sung by slaves working in the cotton and tobacco fields of the OldSouth. One such song, “I Got Shoes, You Got Shoes,” goes, “I got shoes / yougot shoes / all God’s children got shoes. / And when we get to heaven we’llwalk all over God’s heaven, heaven, heaven / when we get to heaven we’ll walkall over God’s heaven.” What is the function of “heaven-talk” and “God-talk”in slaves giving voice to their sufferings? Is it simply pie-in-the-sky bye-and-bye talk that gives comfort to those who own and enjoy the pie here on earth?

Certainly that is how the slave owners heard it. They didn’t hear the sub-versive voice in that singing. They couldn’t, for it would have called into pro-found moral criticism their own behavior!

In their singing, as they worked barefoot in the fields of the master, theslaves gave collective voice to their protest and the cry of their own deserved-ness. Heaven is another way of talking about “how it will be when things arethe way they should be.” And in heaven slaves will have shoes. The word Godis the way the slaves assured each other, under objective circumstances ofdaily life that seemed to prove just the opposite, that Heaven is the really real,and that someday it will be. Because Marx had not seen and did not know ofsuch religious practices, he concluded in the only way he could: “The moreof himself man gives to God the less he has left in himself.”11 But for theAfrican-American slaves, the transcendent vision of religion helped them sub-vert all that was so powerfully trying to subvert their own human dignity. Itwas the cry of protest and the promise of a different future.

That future arrived in the 1960s when a great firestorm of protest brokeout across the South. That storm of protest brought down the walls of legal-ized segregation and the denial of the vote to black citizens of the UnitedStates—and with it the whole way of life called “Jim Crow.” At the very heartof that rebellion was the black church. And collaborating with them in forc-ing a change of federal laws in Washington was the white church (both Protes-tant and Catholic) and Jewish synagogue councils. It was a coalition unfore-seen by Karl Marx, but even more, it was beyond his ability to conceive. Alsobeyond his capacity to conceptualize was the important interaction betweenMarxist social analysis and Latin American liberation theology. Beginning inthe late 1960s and early 1970s progressive clergy and theologians, seeking tostand in solidarity with the impoverished masses of South America, spoke of

Introduction 9

the importance of denouncing exploitation and of announcing hope for a radi-cally different future. Liberation ethicists borrowed heavily from Marxist analy-sis in decoding the rhetoric of developmentalism and insisted that (social) “lib-eration” and (ultimate) “salvation” constitute a single and unified hope. Here wereinheritors of Marx that Marx did not foresee, but they too continue his legacyof criticizing the strategies and self-deceptions of power. They defend the widowand the orphan against the arrogance and indifference of the privileged.

There is ample historical precedence as to why a dialogue would be fruit-ful between Marx and religion, and the importance in that dialogue of theanalysis Marx brings concerning the nature of human work and our estrange-ment from that experience. We are creatures, Marx claims, who are meant tobe most at home “when we are at work,” but now “feel at home only when weare not at work.” Under the conditions of capitalism, “The more the workerexerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien object world which hefashions against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, the lessthere is that belongs to him.”12 In the very activity in which we continue tore-create and transform ourselves as a species, we experience ourselves andact as individual workers trying to make a living. Instead of enjoying the vastlegacy of human tools and skills, which are both the footprints that mark ourhuman past and the path leading toward our species’ precarious future, work-ers today compete against each other for jobs, and in doing so always increasethe power of capital over against themselves. As Marx writes:

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same pro-portion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class oflaborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only solong as their labor increases capital.13

The worker can find work only where capital has decided it can make a profit.Therefore, by working the worker continues to increase the advantage capitalhas in the class struggle. And once capital is de-linked from the nation state—as has happened in the late 20th century—workers lose even more power.

Marx develops three categories to inscribe and analyze the story of humanwork: (1) “the means of production,” (2) “the relations of production,” and(3) “the social powers of production.” The means of production are not simplyfactories or machinery, which are only the surface or visible signs of produc-tion. Instead, transnational corporations and global financial markets decidewhere factories will close and where they will open. And these decisions aredriven by calculations of (usually short-term) profit. That is why Marx is con-vinced that only worker ownership and control of the means of productioncan put human work back into the hands of workers. Even if workers could

10 Introduction

find a way to increase their wages, that would only be something temporary;they would remain “only better paid slaves.”14 It was a lesson that organizedlabor in America unfortunately did not absorb.

The second piece of the puzzle of human work Marx calls relations of pro-duction—the patterns of social life that are generated by work. Marx arguesthat in the modern era these relations of production have been reduced to twoclasses—capitalists and workers. To many this class analysis seems an obvi-ous oversimplification, just as his idea of inevitable class struggle seems out-moded. After all, the revolution that Marx expected at the end of the nine-teenth century did not happen. Industrial capitalism was able to produce soeffectively that it generated a far larger surplus than Marx anticipated. Andworkers were able to organize into unions and use the political machinery ofrepresentative government to gain an increasing share of this surplus. Indeed,a whole new class appeared. Today, we call it the “middle class.”

To my mind that is a misnomer. The way to identify and name a class isto inscribe it in terms of its function and place within the larger division oflabor. My preference is “the professional-managerial class.”15 It is a class madeup of middle management together with lawyers, doctors, teachers, socialworkers, and those engaged in media, advertising, and entertainment. Whatis the function of this new class? Michel Foucault referred to them as “the newdisciplinarians.” That is, their work is to administer, regularize, supervise, nor-malize, pacify (and, if unsuccessful, imprison) the working class and poor.

It is hardly a flattering description, and many of us may object. It is a per-spective that deserves attention, however, because in the new global economythis professional-managerial class is beginning to shrink. There is simply nolonger the surplus available in the older industrial nations, where this classfirst appeared and developed, to reproduce this class. As a class under assault,it needs to radically rethink its loyalties and solidarities.

This kind of class analysis is almost always missing when scholars talkabout what we are talking about here—namely, religion. In the library you willfind hundreds of titles listed under “religion and race” or “religion and gen-der,” but very few listed under “religion and social class.” Yet, how can weunderstand trends such as the rise of evangelical churches and the loss ofmembership by mainline Protestant denominations in the United States in the1980s and 1990s, or the rise of Pentecostals at the expense of the RomanCatholic Church in South America, or the rise of radical Muslims at the expenseof moderate Muslims without doing global class analysis?

Religious scholarship—the work some of us do alongside other membersof the professional-managerial class—needs the instruction of Marx. When itcomes to how power works and disguises its workings, students of religion

Introduction 11

need this master of suspicion. In the twenty-first century, religion promises tobe a major historical force for the first time in four hundred years. Everywhere,whether it is the White House or the presidential palace in Indonesia, religiousleaders are being called upon for far more than ceremonial dressing. And inplaces like the Indian subcontinent, religious differences have become thegrounds both for war and for domestic political maneuvering.

But how religion should deploy its power cannot be understood without acritical analysis of how the new global “means of production” have trans-formed, and are powerfully transforming, the new global “relations of pro-duction.” Our most fundamental dependencies—the everyday world we relyupon and take for granted, a world where we feel safe and have a measure ofcontrol—are changing dramatically. This poses the question, in whose handswill religion decide to be a tool? To answer that question religion will need tolook at what Marx calls the social powers of production.

It may come as a surprise that Marx, even more than the ideological defend-ers of capitalism, deciphered very early the way in which human labor organ-ized by capital would produce a vast and in many respects quite positiveincrease in human productive capacities. Expanding transport and trade,increasing technologies and advancement in tools, the transformation of rurallife by reproducing in the village the values and dreams of metropolitan cul-ture—all of this would change forever the shape of how we humans live. Readthe early pages of The Communist Manifesto. Marx was no Luddite. He did notwant to smash the powers of the new machinery of production but to harnessthose powers to the interests of the workers.

In a warning still mostly missed by the followers of traditional religions,Marx pointed out that these new “social powers of production” would gener-ate a new culture of consumerism. Increased production would demand anexpanded imagination of human needs and satisfactions, an endless cornu-copia of “stuff” necessary to make us happy and satisfied. But it is a satisfac-tion that becomes in the next moment no longer satisfying, and we need more.At the heart of this new culture would be a new ethos—a new code of behav-ior and respect, new patterns of hope and envy, of self-esteem and despair.“The bourgeoisie,” Marx wrote, “has played a most revolutionary role in his-tory.”16 It has transformed the terms of human respect:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand . . . has pitilessly torn asun-der the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and hasleft remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,than callous “cash payment.” . . . It has resolved personal worth into exchangevalue . . . [It] has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored andlooked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, thepriest, the poet, the men of science, into its paid wage laborers.17

12 Introduction

The physician, lawyer, priest, poet and scientist—for whom do such folksnow work? And what is the purpose of their work? And on what grounds dothey ask the rest of us to honor them? More than 150 years ago Marx arguedthat global capitalism was producing a new culture, a culture that defines allvalue, including the value of persons, in terms of the value assigned by themarket. Said directly, what Marx announced and denounced was the radicalassault on the values long cherished by world religions—the intrinsic valueand dignity of the human person. But his warning was not heard.

Twice before an anthology of the writings of Karl Marx on religion has beenpublished in North America. They appeared ten years apart, in 1964 and1974. They are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion (Schocken Books,1964), with an introduction by Reinhold Neibuhr, and On Religion: Karl Marx(McGraw-Hill, 1974), edited by Saul K. Padover. Padover slants his selectionstoward the question of anti-Semitism in Marx. My interests are quite differ-ent. Neibuhr, who was my teacher, was mostly critical of Marx, accusing himof an unrealistic utopianism that a better grasp of the Christian doctrine of sincould have corrected. In contrast to that position, it is my judgment that Marxis less a poorly informed critic of religion than an important friend and dia-logue partner. In this new century the values Marx fought for in terms of thedignity and destiny of human work may find their most effective advocate inworld religions. But if world religions are to take up that task, they will haveto undergo a fundamental self-examination. When confronted by the crisiscaused by continuing world poverty compounded by environmental limits toendless economic growth, religion may be tempted to retreat into enclaves ofotherworldly hope. If so, then Marx will have been proved correct in his judg-ment that religion suffers from an irremediable “inverted consciousness”—aconsciousness that looks upon the world but sees it upside down. On the otherhand, evidence from Christian liberation theology and from liberation the-ologies being developed by Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist scholars and activistsindicates a movement toward positive engagement. Only time will tell whetherworld religions can come home to planet Earth—a place that may or may nothave been given birth by the gods, but most assuredly gave birth to a creaturewhich, time and again and in all its varied ways, poses to itself the questionof God.

NOTES

1. See Dialectics of Nature (1873).2. The Communist Manifesto, chapter 1, p. 144.3. Ibid., chapter 3 (not included in this book).

Introduction 13

4. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 171.5. “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy,” p. 84; emphasis in the original.6. Ibid.7. “Estranged Labor,” p. 122; emphasis in the original.8. Ibid., p. 123; emphasis in the original.9. Ibid., p. 123; emphasis in original.10. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 171.11. “Estranged Labor,” p. 119.12. Ibid.13. The Communist Manifesto, chapter 1, p. 149.14. The Communist Manifesto, chapter 2 (not included).15. See the essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,”

in Between Labor and Capital, edited by Pat Walker (1973).16. The Communist Manifesto, chapter 1, p. 146.17. Ibid., p. 146.

14 Introduction

Marx was descended from famous rabbis on both sides of hisfamily going back to at least the fifteenth century. And records show that in Trier,the town where Marx was born in 1818, almost all the rabbis of the past had beenhis paternal kin. His father’s brother was a rabbi there and Karl became a boyhoodfriend of the rabbi’s son. Marx’s own father, Heschel, a lawyer, had converted toChristianity a few months before Karl was born—but only under extreme pressure.With the French defeat in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Trier was returned toPrussian control. At thirty-eight years of age, with a wife and child to support, Hes-chel Marx was faced with the decision under Prussian law either to renounce hisancestral religion or to give up his career as a lawyer. Heschel, supported by severalleading Christian lawyers, appealed to Berlin for special dispensation. The appealwas denied, and Heschel was baptized a Lutheran sometime in 1817. But HenrietteMarx, Karl’s mother, refused conversion until late in her life, after all eight of herchildren had long since been baptized as Christians.

It was, you would think, a memory of humiliation that would have imprintedthe young Marx with a bias against the church rather than against the synagogue,but that was not to be the case. Instead, Marx attended the local Protestant Volkss-chule in a town that was 90 percent Roman Catholic, and as a minority became an

15

P A R T I

The Young Man Marx

enthusiastic student of Evangelical theology from which he learned to think of “theJew” as an abstract category representing greed and material preoccupation. It wasa point of view that Marx was not to relinquish when, in his university days andstudying philosophy, he renounced his Christian religion and proclaimed himself anatheist.

His first interest at the University of Bonn had been in Romantic poetry. But bythe time he transferred to the University of Berlin in 1837 he wrote in a letter to hisfather that his interest had turned from poetry to philosophy. Marx joined theBerlin Doctors Club1 and confessed to his father that he had passed from Kant andFichte “into the clutches” of Hegel. Earlier, while in Bonn, he had met and fallen inlove with Jenny von Westphalen, who returned the favor. They would marry andenjoy a close and lifelong relationship. Late in his life, Marx wrote to Jenny: “Thereare actually many females in the world, and some among them are beautiful. Butwhere could I find again a face whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is areminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life.”2 And this he wrote inspite of their years of exile and poverty.

Having publicly associated himself with the cause of the Prussian workingclass, Marx effectively ended any possibility of academic employment. He became ajournalist and by 1843, because of his public views on politics and Prussian statereligion, found himself exiled from Germany to Paris where he met the man whowould become his permanent friend and supporter, Friedrich Engels. The two dis-covered that they shared a passion for Feuerbach and his criticism not only ofChristianity but of the philosophical idealism of Hegel.

I have selected for this first section several writings from the young man Marxthat reflect his warm personality and his early enthusiasm for social justice.Included also are writings that evidence a growing disenchantment with Christian-ity and religion in general in favor of critical philosophy and active advocacy forwhat Marx called “the impoverished, the socially and politically deprived masses.”3

If the first turn against religion was practical and moral, Marx developed a theoret-ical criticism under the influence of Feuerbach (see Parts II and IV). I have includedhere as well his essay “On the Jewish Question” which displays simultaneously andironically an unfortunate stereotyping of Judaism as a religion even as it arguesthat the reformation of society must look beyond all religions. For Marx emancipa-tory practices require emancipation not from a particular religion but from religionin general. He came to this conclusion because the state religion that he saw andexperienced had not simply abandoned the poor and working classes but hadbecome an ideological weapon of the ruling class in Germany and in England. Itwas the only religion Marx would ever know.

16 Part I: The Young Man Marx

NOTES

1. The Doctors Club at the University of Berlin was a group of “Young Hegelians” con-cerned with showing that the true basis of Christianity is to be found in historical experi-ence and ultimately in man’s social needs.

2. Cited in the New York Times Magazine, Feb. 13, 1994.3. The Communist Manifesto, chapter 2 (not included in this book).

“REFLECTIONS OF A YOUTH ON CHOOSING AN OCCUPATION” (1835)

This is Marx’s answer to an examination question required for graduationfrom the Gymnasium at Trier. It displays a youthful enthusiasm for a lifeof scholarship but hints at social constraints that impose themselves uponour life choices. How these “social relations” are constructed will become amajor theme in his mature writings.

Nature has assigned to the animal the sphere of its activity, and theanimal acts calmly within it, not striving beyond, not even surmis-

ing that there is another. To man, too, the Deity gave a general goal, to improvemankind and himself, but left it up to him to seek the means by which he canattain this goal, left it up to him to choose the position in society which is mostappropriate and from which he can best elevate both himself and society.

This choice is a great privilege over other creatures but at the same timean act which can destroy man’s entire life, defeat all his plans, and make himunhappy. Hence, a youth who is beginning a career and who does not wishto leave his most important concerns to chance certainly sees his foremost dutyin considering this choice seriously.

Everyone has a goal which appears to be great, at least to himself, and [it]is great when deepest conviction, the innermost voice of the heart, pronouncesit great; for the Deity never leaves man entirely without a guide; the Deityspeaks softly, but with certainty.

This voice, however, is easily drowned out, and what we thought to be inspi-ration may have been created by the fleeting moment and again perhaps destroyedby it. Perhaps our fantasy is inflamed, our emotions excited; phantoms movebefore our eyes, and eagerly we rush to the goal, believing that the Deity pointedit out to us. But what we ardently pressed to our breast soon repels us, and wesee our whole existence destroyed.

Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835) 17

We must seriously ask ourselves, therefore, whether we are really inspiredabout a vocation, whether an inner voice approves of it, or whether the inspi-ration was a deception, whether that which we took as the Deity’s calling tous was self-deceit. But how else could we recognize this except by searchingfor the source of our inspiration?

Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easilyhave caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration. But reasoncan no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition. He tumbleswhere his vehement drive calls him; no longer does he choose his position,but rather chance and luster determine it.

Then we are not called to the position where we can most shine. It is notthe one which, in the long succession of years during which we may hold it,will never make us weary, subdue our zeal, or dampen our inspiration. Soonwe shall see our wishes unfulfilled and our ideas unsatisfied. We shall have agrievance against the Deity and curse humanity.

But not only ambition can cause a sudden inspiration about a position;we may have embellished it with our fantasies, embellished it to the highestpoint that life can offer. We have not analyzed it, not considered the entireburden and great responsibility to be placed upon us. We have regarded it onlyfrom a distance, and distance deceives.

In this matter our own reason cannot be the counselor. Neither experi-ence nor profound observation supports our reason, which is deceived byemotion and blinded by fantasy. But where shall we look for support whenour reason leaves us in the lurch?

Our heart calls upon our parents who have walked the path of life, haveexperienced fate’s severity.

And if our inspiration still endures, if we still love that position and believewe are called to it after we have tested it objectively, perceived its burden, andbecome acquainted with its encumbrances—then we may strive for it, theninspiration does not deceive us, nor does overeagerness rush us.

But we cannot always choose the vocation to which we believe we arecalled. Our social relations, to some extent, have already begun to form beforewe are in a position to determine them.

Even our physical nature often threateningly opposes us, and no one daremock its rights!

To be sure, we can lift ourselves above it, but then we fall all the faster.We then venture to construct a building on rotten foundations, and our entirelife is an unfortunate struggle between the intellectual and the physical prin-ciple. When one cannot calm the elements fighting in himself, how can he


stand up against life’s tempestuous urge, how is he to act calmly? Out of calm-ness alone can great and beautiful deeds emerge. Calmness is the only soil onwhich ripe fruits thrive.

Although we cannot work for long, and seldom joyfully, with a physicalnature inappropriate to our position, the thought of sacrificing our welfare to duty,of acting with weakness, yet with strength, always arises. However, if we havechosen a position for which we do not possess the talents, we shall never be ableto fill it properly, we shall soon recognize with shame our own incapability andsay to ourselves that we are a useless creature, a member of society who cannotfill his post. The most natural result then, is self-contempt, and what feeling ismore painful, what can less be displaced by anything the external world offers?Self-contempt is a serpent which eternally gnaws in one’s breast, sucks out theheart’s lifeblood, and mixes it with the poison of misanthropy and despair.

A deception about our aptitude for a position we have examined closelyis a misdeed which revengefully falls back on ourselves, and even though itmay not be censured by the external world, provokes in our breast a pain moreterrible than the external world can cause.

When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permitus to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees usthe greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completelyconvinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approachthe universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.

Dignity elevates man most, bestows a high nobleness to all his acts, all hisendeavors, and permits him to stand irreproachable, admired by the crowdand above it.

Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as serviletools but rather create independently within our circle. Only that position canimpart dignity which requires no reproachable acts, reproachable not even inappearance—a position which the best person can undertake with noble pride.The position which guaranteed this the most is not always the highest, but itis always the best.

Just as a position without dignity lowers us, we certainly succumb to theburden of one based on ideas we later recognize as false.

Then we see no aid except in self-deception, and what a desperate rescueis the one that guarantees self-betrayal.

The vocations which do not take hold of life but death rather, with abstracttruths are the most dangerous for the youth whose principles are not yet crys-tallized, whose conviction is not yet firm and unshakable, though at the sametime they seem to be the most lofty ones when they have taken root deep in

Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835) 19

the breast and when we can sacrifice life and all striving for the ideas whichhold sway in them.

They can make him happy who is called to them; but they destroy himwho takes them overhurriedly, without reflection, obeying the moment.

But the high opinion we have of the ideas on which our vocation is basedbestows on us a higher standpoint in society, enlarges our own dignity, makesour actions unwavering.

Whoever chooses a vocation which he esteems highly will carefully avoidmaking himself unworthy of it; therefore, he will act nobly because his posi-tion in society is noble.

The main principle, however, which must guide us in the selection of avocation is the welfare of humanity, our own perfection. One should not thinkthat these two interests combat each other, that the one must destroy theother. Rather, man’s nature makes it possible for him to reach his fulfillmentonly by working for the perfection and welfare of his society.

If a person works only for himself he can perhaps be a famous scholar, a greatwise man, a distinguished poet, but never a complete, genuinely great man.

History calls those the greatest men who ennobled themselves by work-ing for the universal. Experience praises as the most happy the one who madethe most people happy. Religion itself teaches us that the ideal for which weare all striving sacrificed itself for humanity, and who would dare to destroysuch a statement?

When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most tohumanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Thenwe experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs tomillions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tearsof noble men will fall on our ashes.

LETTER TO HIS FATHER: ON A TURNING-POINT IN LIFE (1837)

After two years at the University of Bonn, Marx transferred to Berlin,where he quickly left behind his earlier interest in Romantic poetry. Hebecame grasped by the more sober reflections of Hegel who had once saidof Kant’s categorical imperative about treating persons as ends and notmeans, “What does that have to do with the Norman conquest of Eng-land?” Increasingly, Marx studied power and how power works. The letteralso displays Marx’s warm relationship with his father and discloses hislove for Jenny von Westphalen.


Berlin, November 10

Dear Father,

There are moments in life which mark the close of a period like bound-ary posts and at the same time definitely point in a new direction.

At such a point of transition, we feel compelled to contemplate the pastand the present with the eagle eye of thought to become aware of our actualposition. Indeed, world history itself loves such a retrospect, and reflects uponitself, often producing the semblance of a retrogression or standstill, while inreality it has merely eased itself back in an armchair to comprehend itself andpenetrate intellectually its own act, the act of the mind.

In such moments, however, the individual becomes lyrical, for every trans-formation is to some extent a swan song, to some extent the overture to a greatnew poem, which strives to gain shape in tints still blurred but brilliant. Yet, weshould like to erect a memorial to what already has been experienced so it mayregain in sentiment the place which it lost in the world of action; and where couldwe find a holier site than in the heart of our parents, the most clement judge, themost ardent participator, the sun of love, whose fire warms the innermost centerof our endeavors! How could much that is objectionable and blameworthy bet-ter find compensation and pardon than by becoming manifestation of an essen-tially necessary condition? How, at any rate, could the often hostile turn of chanceand aberration of the spirit escape the reproach of being due to a twisted heart?

When, therefore, at the close of a year here, I now glance back upon whathas happened and in this way, dear Father, answer your very affectionate let-ter from Ems, allow me to contemplate my circumstances, how I regard lifein general as the expression of reflection taking shape in all directions—in sci-ence, art, private matters.

When I left you, a new world had just opened for me, the world of love,at first a love that was frenzied with yearning and void of hope. Even the jour-ney to Berlin, which otherwise would have extremely delighted me, would haveincited me to contemplate nature, would have inflamed me with the joy ofliving, left me cold. It even depressed me profoundly, for the rocks I saw wereno rougher, no harsher, than the feelings of my soul; the big cities were notmore lively than my blood; the tables in the inns were not more overladen,the food not more indigestible than were the contents of my imagination; and,to conclude, art was not so beautiful as Jenny.

Having arrived in Berlin, I broke all existing ties, reluctantly made veryfew visits, and sought to immerse myself in science and art.

In my state of mind at that time, lyrical poetry inevitably had to be myfirst concern, at any rate the most agreeable and most obvious; but, in accord

Letter to His Father: On a Turning-Point in Life (1837) 21

with my position and whole previous development, it was purely idealistic. Aremote beyond, such as my love, became my heaven, my art. Everything realgrew vague, and all that is vague lacks boundaries. Onslaughts against the pres-ent, broad and shapeless expressions of unnatural feeling, constructed purelyout of the blue, the complete opposition of what is and what ought to be,rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts but perhaps also a certainwarmth of sentiment and a struggle for movement characterize all the poemsin the first three volumes I sent to Jenny. The whole horizon of a longingwhich sees no frontiers assumed many forms and frustrated my effort to writewith poetic conciseness.

But poetry could only be, should only be, a companion. I had to studyjurisprudence, and above all I felt an urge to wrestle with philosophy. The twowere so closely connected that I read Heineccius, Thibaut, and the sources inschoolboy fashion, quite uncritically. I translated, for instance, the first twobooks of the Pandects into German, but I also tried, in studying law, to workout a philosophy of law. I prefixed, as introduction, some metaphysical propo-sitions and developed this ill-starred opus as far as the topic of public law—a work of nearly three hundred pages.

Particularly here I was greatly disturbed by the conflict between what isand what ought to be, a conflict peculiar to idealism, and this gave rise to thefollowing hopelessly inaccurate classification. First of all, what I gratuitouslychristened “metaphysics of law”—that is, principles, reflections, determinativeconcepts—was severed from all actual law and from any actual form of law asin the writings of Fichte, only in my case in a more modern and less substantialfashion. Furthermore, the unscientific form of mathematical dogmatism—where the subject wanders about the topic, argues hither and thither, whilethe topic itself is never formulated as something rich in content, somethingalive—was from the first a hindrance to the comprehension of the truth.

The nature of the triangle induces the mathematician to construct it, demon-strate its properties, but it remains a mere idea in space and undergoes no fur-ther development. We must put the triangle beside another form. Then itassumes different positions, and the other form with its various relative posi-tions endows the triangle with different relations and truths. On the otherhand, in the concrete expression of the living world of thought—as in law, thestate, nature, philosophy as a whole—the object itself must be studied in itsdevelopment; there must be no arbitrary classifications; the rationale of the thingitself must be disclosed in all its contradictoriness and find its unity in itself.

As a second part there followed the philosophy of law, that is, as I thensaw the matter, the study of the development of ideas in positive Roman law,as if positive law in the development of its ideas (I do not mean in its purely


finite determinations) could be anything different from the formulation of theconcept of law which the first part was to include.

On top of this I had divided this part into a formal and a material doctrineof law. The former was to describe the pure form of the system in its succes-sion and interaction, the classification and the scope; the latter, on the otherhand, the content, the condensation of the form in its content. This was an errorwhich I share with Herr von Savigny, as I was to find out later when readinghis scholarly work on possession, but with the difference that he speaks of for-mal determinate concepts as “finding the place which this or that doctrineoccupies in the suppositional Roman system” and of material determinate con-cepts as “the doctrine of positivity which the Romans ascribe to a conceptestablished this way,” whereas I understood by form the necessary architectonicof the formulations of the concept and by matter the necessary quality of theseformulations. My mistake was that I believed one could and must develop theone apart from the other, with the result that I achieved no genuine form buta desk with a number of drawers I subsequently littered with sand.

The concept is, after all, the intermediary between form and content. In aphilosophical disquisition on law, therefore, the one must arise out of theother because form can only be the continuation of content. Thus I finally didarrive at a classification, though the subject lends itself at most to superficialand shallow classification, but the spirit of law and truth had perished. All lawwas subdivided into covenanted and uncovenanted. I take the liberty of writ-ing down the schema, with the exception of the ius publicum which is also dealtwith in the formal part, to acquaint you with it better.

I IIIus privatum Ius publicum

I Ius privatum

A. About conditional covenanted private lawB. About conditional uncovenanted law

A. About conditional covenanted private law: a) Personal law; b) Property law;c) Personal property law.

a) Personal law

I. On the basis of encumbered contract; II. on the basis of secured contract;III. on the basis of open contract.

I. On the basis of encumbered contract.

2. Contract of agreement (societas); 3. Contract of service (locatio conductio)


3. Locatio conductio

1. As referring to operaea) Actual locatio conductio (I mean neither the Roman renting nor leas-

ing);b) mandatum

2. As referring to usus reia) As to land: usus fructus (again not in the merely Roman meaning);b) As to buildings: habitatio

II. On the basis of secured contract.

1. Arbitration or mediation contract. 2. Securance contract.

III. On the basis of open contract.

2. Contract by consent

1. fide iussio; 2. negotiorum gestio

3. Deed1. donatio; 2. gratiae promissum

b) Property law

I. On the basis of encumbered contract.

2. permutatio stricte sic dicta.1. Actual permutatio; 2. mutuum (usurae); 3. emptio, venditio

II. On the basis of secured contract. pignus.

III. On the basis of open contract.

2. commodatum; 3. depositum.

But why should I continue filling pages with things I have discarded? Thewhole is permeated with trichotomous classifications, penned with wearisomeprolixity. I misused the Roman notions most barbarously in order to forcethem into my system. Still, to some extent at least, I gained a conspectus ofmy topic and an affection for it.

At the close of the discussion of material private law, I saw the fallacious-ness of the whole, which in its fundamental schema borders on the Kantian,though differing wholly from Kant in matters of detail. Once more I realizedthat I could not make my way without philosophy. Hence, I was again able,with good conscience, to throw myself into the arms of philosophy, and I


wrote a new basic metaphysical system. Upon its completion I was again con-strained to recognize its futility and that of all my previous endeavors.

Meanwhile I had acquired the habit of making excerpts from all the books Iwas reading, from Lessing’s Laocoön, Solger’s Erwin, Winckelmann’s History of Art,Luden’s German History. While doing this, I scribbled down some reflections. Atthe same time I translated Tacitus’ Germania, Ovid’s Tristium libri. With the aid ofgrammar books I began the private study of English and Italian, but as yet havenot achieved anything. I read Klein’s book on criminal law and his Annals, and alot of the most recent literature, though the latter only incidentally.

At the end of the semester, I once more sought the dance of the muses andthe music of satyrs. Already in the last pages I sent you, idealism plays its partin the form of forced humor (“Skorpion and Felix”) and in an unsuccessfuldramatic fantasy (“Oulanem”), until at length it takes an entirely differentdirection and changes into pure formal art, for the most part without anystimulating objects and without any lively movement of ideas.

Nevertheless, these last poems are the only ones in which suddenly, as ifby the wave of a magician’s wand—it was shattering at the beginning—therealm of true poetry flashed open before me like a distant faery palace, andall my creations collapsed into nothing.

During the first semester I was awake many a night, engaged in these mul-tifarious occupations. I went through many struggles and experienced muchstimulation from within and without. Yet, in the end, I found that my mindhad not been greatly enriched while I had neglected nature, art, and the world,and had alienated my friends. My body apparently reacted. A physician adviseda stay in the country, and so for the first time I traversed the whole spread-out town and went through the gate to Stralow. I did not anticipate that I, ananemic weakling, should there ripen into a man with a robust and solid frame.

A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies had been shattered, and new godshad to be found.

Setting out from idealism—which, let me say in passing, I had comparedto and nourished with that of Kant and Fichte—I hit upon seeking the Ideain the real itself. If formerly the gods had dwelt above the world, they had nowbecome its center.

I had read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy and had found its grotesque,craggy melody unpleasing. I wished to dive into the ocean once again but withthe definite intention of discovering our mental nature to be just as determined,concrete, and firmly established as our physical—no longer to practice the artof fencing but to bring pure pearls into the sunlight.

I wrote a dialogue of about twenty-four pages, entitled “Cleanthes, or theStarting Point and the Necessary Progress of Philosophy.” Here, in a way, art


and science, which had been severed, were reunited. And now, an energeticwanderer, I set out for the main task, a philosophic-dialectical discussion ofthe godhead manifested as a concept per se, as religion, as nature, and as his-tory. My last sentence was the beginning of the Hegelian system, and thistask—for which I had acquainted myself to some extent with natural science,Schelling, and history, and which (since it was to be a new logic) is written insuch a fashion that even I myself now can scarcely make head or tail of it—this darling child of mine, nurtured in moonlight, bears me like a false-heartedsiren into the clutches of the enemy.

Because of my vexation, I was for several days quite unable to think. Likea lunatic I ran around in the garden beside the Spree’s dirty water “whichwashes the soul and dilutes tea.” I even went out hunting with my host andthen returned hotfoot to Berlin, wishing to embrace every loafer at the streetcorners.

Thereafter I carried on positive studies only: Savigny’s study on ownership,[Anselm] Feuerbach’s and Grolmann’s works on criminal law, Cramer’s De ver-borum significatione, Wenning-Ingenheim’s pandect system and Mühlenbruch’sDoctrina Pandectarum (which I am still reading), and finally some of Lauter-bach’s works, books on civil law and especially on ecclesiastical law. As regardsthis last, I have read through and made extracts from almost all the first partof Gratian, Concordia discordantium canonum, as well as its appendix, andLancelotti’s Institutiones. Then I translated part of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, read Dedignitate et augmentis scientiarum of the famous Bacon of Verulam, occupiedmyself intensively with Reimarus whose work on the mechanical instincts ofanimals I followed through with delight. Next I came to German law, butmainly concerned myself with the capitularies of the Franconian kings and theletters of the popes to them.

From grief over Jenny’s illness and because of the futility of my lost labors,from consuming vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detest, I fell sick,as, my dear Father, I have previously related. Having recovered, I burned all mypoems, my sketches for novellas, etc., under the illusion that I could refrain fromanything of the kind—and there is as yet no evidence to the contrary.

While out of sorts, I had got to know Hegel from beginning to end, andmost of his disciples as well. Through several meetings with friends in StralowI became a member of a Doctors’ Club to which some instructors and my mostintimate friend in Berlin, Dr. [Adolf] Rutenberg, belong. In discussions manya conflicting opinion was voiced, and I was more and more chained to the cur-rent world philosophy from which I had thought to escape. But all tones weremuted and a fit of irony possessed me as was natural after so many negations.Jenny’s silence added to this, and I could not rest until I had become up-to-


date and acquired the current scientific view by some poor productions suchas The Visit.

If I have perhaps failed to explain this last semester clearly to you as a wholeand in all its details, if I left its shadings hazy, you will forgive me, dear Father,on account of my eagerness to speak of the present.

Herr [Adalbert] von Chamisso has sent me a piddling note in which heinforms me of his “regret that his Almanac can make no use of my contribu-tions, having long since gone to press.” I swallowed his note in anger. Wigand,the bookseller, has forwarded my plan to Dr. Schmidt, manager of Wunder’sWarehouse of Good Cheese and Bad Literature. I am enclosing Wigand’s let-ter; Schmidt has not answered yet. Meanwhile I have by no means abandonedthe plan, all the more since all the aesthetic notables of the Hegelian schoolhave promised to co-operate, induced by Instructor [Bruno] Bauer, who isimportant among them, and by my coadjutor, Dr. Rutenberg.

As to the question of a career as an official, dear Father, I have recentlymade the acquaintance of an assistant judge, Schmidthänner by name, whoadvises me to enter upon this after passing the third of my law examinations.The plan appeals to me, since I really prefer jurisprudence to any study ofadministration. This gentleman told me that from the Münster provincial courtof appeal he and many others had in three years attained the position of assis-tant judge, which, he says, is not difficult—provided, of course, that one workshard—since in that part of the world the stages are not as they are in Berlinand elsewhere strictly marked out. If, as assistant judge, one obtains the doc-torate, there are excellent chances of speedy appointment as professor extraor-dinary. This is what happened to Herr Gärtner in Bonn after he had written amediocre book on provincial law-codes, his only other title to fame being thathe proclaims himself a member of the Hegelian school of jurists. But, dearFather, best of fathers, can’t we talk all this over face to face? Eduard’s condi-tion, dear Mother’s trouble, your own indisposition—I hope it is nothing seri-ous—all combine to make me want to hurry home without delay. It is virtu-ally imperative that I should. Indeed, I should already be with you, were I notin doubt as to your approval.

Believe me, my dear Father, this is not a selfish wish (though I should beso happy to see Jenny again). I am driven rather by a thought I cannot putinto words. Actually in some respects it would be difficult for me to come; butsuch considerations, as my darling Jenny writes, all give way to the fulfillmentof sacred duties.

I beg you, dear Father, whatever you may decide, not to show this letter—or at any rate this page of it—to Mother. My unexpected arrival may perhapscheer the great, magnificent woman.


My letter to her was written long before Jenny’s dear letter arrived, so Imay unwittingly have written too much about unsuitable matters.

In the hope that the clouds which hang over our family will gradually dis-perse; that I shall be permitted to share your sufferings and mingle my tearswith yours, and perhaps in your presence show the deep affection, the immeas-urable love, which I often have not been able to express as I should like; inthe hope that you too, dear and eternally beloved Father, mindful of my storm-tossed feelings, will forgive me when my heart must often have seemed to havegone astray as the burdens of my spirit stifled it; in the hope that you will soonbe fully restored to health and I shall be able to clasp you in my arms to tellyou all I feel,

I remain always your loving son,

Karl.

Forgive the illegible handwriting and defective style, dear Father. It isnearly four o’clock, the candle has burned out, and my eyes are clouded. Rest-lessness has overwhelmed me. I shall not be able to lay the specters hauntingme until I am in your dear presence.

Please give my best love to my sweet Jenny. I have already read her lettera dozen times, finding new charms in it each time. In every respect, styleincluded, it is the most beautiful letter I can imagine a woman writing.

THE LEADING ARTICLE OF NO. 179 OF KÖLNISCHE ZEITUNG

Writing in the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, Marx criticizes those who holdthat religious vitality is the heart of a strong culture and argues, instead,for the separation of church and state. He is clearly under the influence ofHegel’s philosophy, although he is already using Feuerbach’s materialismto criticize Hegel’s idealism.

Hitherto we credited Kölnische Zeitung with being, if not the “paperof Rhineland intellectuals,” at least the Rhineland “Advertiser.” We

saw above all in its political leaders a means, as wise as it was select, of dis-gusting the reader with politics so that he would turn all the more eagerly tothe luxuriant, industriously pulsating and often charmingly witty domain ofadvertisement, so that here too the motto would be per aspera ad astra, throughpolitics to oysters. But the fair proportion that Kölnische Zeitung so far man-


THE LEADING ARTICLE OF NO. 179 OF KOLNISCHE ZEITUNG¨

aged to maintain between politics and advertisements has been upset of lateby what could be called “political industry advertisements.” In the initial uncer-tainty where the new variety should be inserted, it happened that an advertwas transformed into a leading article and the leading article into an advert ofthe kind that is called in political language a denunciation but which, if paidfor, is merely called an advertisement.

It is a custom in the north to treat guests to exquisite liqueurs before mea-ger meals. We are all the more willing to follow that custom in regard to ournorthern guests and give them spirits before the meal, as in the meal itself,the “ailing” article in No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung, we find no spirits at all. Sofirst we treat the reader to a scene from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods in a trans-lation accessible to all, for among our readers there will be at least one whois no Hellene.

LUCIAN’S DIALOGUES OF THE GODS

XXIV. COMPLAINTS OF HERMES

Hermes, MaiaHermes. Is there, dear mother, in the whole heavens, a God more harassed

than I?Maia. Speak not so, my son.Hermes. Why should I not? I, who have a multitude of affairs to attend to,

must always work alone and submit to so many slavish duties. I must risein the small hours of the morning and clean out the dining hall, arrangethe couches in the Council Room, and when everything is in order attendon Jupiter, running errands all day as his messenger. Hardly am I back,covered with dust, when I must serve the ambrosia. And what is mostannoying, I am the only one to whom no peace is granted even at night,for then I must escort the souls of the dead to Pluto and act as attendantat their judgment. It is not enough for me to work during the day. I mustattend the gymnastics, act the herald at the assemblies of the people, andhelp the popular orators to learn their speeches. No, I, who am tornasunder by so many matters, must over and above attend to the whole busi-ness of the dead.

Since his expulsion from the Olympus Hermes has been going on by force ofhabit with his “slavish duties” and the whole business of the dead.

The Leading Article of No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung 29

LUCIANS’S DIALOGUES OF THE GODS

Whether it was Hermes himself or his son Pan, the caprine god, whowrote the ailing article in No. 179, we shall leave the reader to decide, remem-bering that Hermes of the Greeks was the god of eloquence and logic.

“To spread philosophical and religious views by means of the newspapersor to combat them in newspapers seem to us equally inadmissible.”

As the old man chattered away it was easy for me to note that he wasbent on a tedious litany of oracles, but I calmed my impatience, for whyshould I not believe the sensible man who is so impartial as to speak out hisopinion quite frankly in his own house, and I read on. But lo and behold!This article, which cannot be reproached with a single philosophical view,has at least a tendency to combat philosophical views and spread religiousones.

Of what use to us is an article which disputes its own right to exist, whichintroduces itself by a declaration of its own incompetence. The loquaciousauthor will answer us. He explains how his bombastic articles are to be read.He confines himself to giving fragments whose “concatenation and intercon-nection” he leaves to “the ingenuity of his reader” to discover—the most appro-priate method for the kind of advertisement that he deals with. So we shall“concatenate and interconnect” and it is not our fault if the rosary does notbecome a string of pearls.

The author states:“A party which makes use of these means” (spreading and combating

philosophical and religious views in newspapers) “thereby shows, in our opin-ion, that its intentions are not honorable and that it is less interested in teach-ing and enlightening the people than in attaining ulterior aims.”

This being his opinion, the article can have nothing else in view than theattainment of ulterior aims. These “ulterior aims” will not remain concealed.

The state, the author says, has not only the right but also the duty “tosilence non-professional praters.” He means the opponents of his views, for hehas long agreed with himself that he is a professional prater.

It is a question, therefore, of a further tightening of censorship in religiousmatters, a new police measure against the press which has hardly begun tobreathe freely.

“In our opinion, the state can be reproached with undue forbearance ratherthan with excessive rigor.”

But the author of the leading article thinks better of it: it is dangerous toreproach the state; so he addresses himself to the authorities, his accusationagainst freedom of the press becomes an accusation against the censors; heaccuses the censors of applying too “little censorship.”


“A blameworthy forbearance has been shown so far, not, admittedly, by thestate, but by `individual authorities,’ in allowing the new philosophical schoolto permit itself the most unseemly attacks upon Christianity in public papersand other printed works not intended exclusively for scientific readers.”

The author pauses again and thinks better of it again: not eight days agohe found that with freedom of censorship there was too little freedom of thepress; he now finds that with compulsion of censors there is too little com-pulsion by the censorship.

That must be set right again.“As long as censorship exists it is its most urgent duty to cut out such repul-

sive excrescences of boyish insolence as have repeatedly offended our eyes inrecent days.”

Weak eyes! Weak eyes! And the “weakest eye will be offended by an expres-sion which can only be intended for the powers of comprehension of thebroad masses.”

If relaxed censorship allows repulsive excrescences to appear, what can beexpected of freedom of the press? If our eyes are too weak to bear the “inso-lence” [Übermut] of what has been censored, how can they be strong enoughto bear the “audacity” [Mut] of the free press?

“As long as censorship exists it is its most urgent duty to. . . .” And onceit no longer exists? The sentence must be interpreted: It is the most urgentduty of the censorship to exist as long as possible.

And again the author thinks better of it:“It is not our function to act as public prosecutor and therefore we refrain

from any more precise specification.”What heavenly kindness the man has! He refrains from more precise “spec-

ification” whereas only by quite precise, quite distinct signs could he proveand show what his view aims at; he utters but vague, half-whispered words ofsuspicion; it is not his function to act as public prosecutor: his function is tobe a concealed accuser.

For the last time the wretched man thinks better of it: his function is towrite liberal leading articles, to play the “loyal supporter of freedom of thepress.” He therefore springs to his last position:

“We could not refrain from protesting against a procedure which, if it isnot a result of casual negligence, can have no other aim than to discredit afreer press movement in the public eye and to give the game to its opponentswho fear to lose by playing fair.”

The censorship, says this champion of freedom of the press, who is asdaring as he is penetrating, if it is not merely the English leopard with the


inscription, “I sleep, wake me not!”, has engaged in this “godless” procedurein order to discredit a freer press movement in the public eye.

Is there still any need to discredit a press movement which draws the cen-sorship’s attention to “casual negligences” and which expects to get its renownin the public eye from the “censor’s penknife”?

This movement can be called “free” only to the extent that the licence ofshamelessness is sometimes called “free.” And is it not the shamelessness ofabsurdity and hypocrisy to try to pass as a champion of the freer press move-ment and at the same time to teach that the press will fall into the gutter themoment two gendarmes stop holding its arms.

What do we need the censorship for, what do we need this leading arti-cle for when the philosophical press discredits itself in the public eye? Theauthor, of course, does not want to limit in any way “the freedom of scientificresearch.”

“In our day, scientific research is rightly allowed the widest and most bound-less scope.”

But the following pronouncement will show what a conception this gen-tleman has of scientific research:

“A sharp distinction must be made between what is required by the free-dom of scientific research, which can but benefit Christianity itself, and whatis beyond the bounds of scientific research.”

Who should decide on the bounds of scientific research if not scientificresearch itself! According to the leading article bounds should be prescribedto scientific research. The leading article, therefore, knows an “official reason”which does not learn from scientific research but teaches it and which, like alearned providence, prescribes the length every hair should have to transforma scientific beard into one of world significance. The leading article believesin the scientific inspiration of the censorship.

Before further pursuing these “silly” explanations of the leading article on“scientific research,” let us regale ourselves a while on Mr. H.’s “philosophy ofreligion,” his “own science”!

“Religion is the foundation of the state, as it is the most necessary condi-tion for every social association not aimed merely at attaining some ulterioraim.”

Proof: “In its crudest form as childish fetishism it raises man to a certainextent above sensuous appetites, which, if he lets himself be dominated exclu-sively by them, debase him to an animal and make him incapable of fulfillingany more elevated purpose.”

The leading article calls fetishism the “crudest form” of religion. It there-fore admits something which is recognized as established by all men of “sci-


entific research” even without his consensus, that “animal worship” is a higherreligious form than fetishism, but does not animal worship debase man belowthe animal, does it not make the animal man’s god?

Now this talk about “fetishism”! Real pfenning magazine learning! Fetishismis so far from raising man above the appetites that it is on the contrary “the reli-gion of sensuous appetites.” The fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish wor-shipper into believing that an “inanimate object” will give up its natural char-acter to gratify his desires. The crude appetite of the fetish worshipper thereforesmashes the fetish when the latter ceases to be its most devoted servant.

“In those nations which attained a higher historic significance, the primeof national life coincides with the highest development of their sense of reli-gion, and the decline of their greatness and power coincides with the declineof their religious culture.”

The truth will be obtained by exactly reversing the assertion of the author;he has turned history upside down. Greece and Rome are certainly the coun-tries of the highest “historical culture” among the peoples of antiquity. The peakof Greece’s greatest internal progress coincides with the time of Pericles, itsexternal zenith with the time of Alexander. In Pericles’ time the sophists,Socrates (who may be called philosophy incarnate), art and rhetoric had super-seded religion. Alexander’s time was the time of Aristotle, who rejected the eter-nity of the “individual” spirit and the god of the positive religions. And thenRome! Read Cicero! Epicurean, stoic or sceptic philosophy was the religion ofthe Romans of culture when Rome reached the zenith of its career. If with thedownfall of the old states the religions of the old states disappear, this needsno further explanation than that the “true religion” of the peoples of antiquitywas the cult of “their nationality,” of their “state.” It was not the downfall ofthe old religions that brought the downfall of the old states, but the downfallof the old states that brought the downfall of the old religions. And ignorancelike that of the leading article proclaims itself the “legislator of scientificresearch” and writes “decrees” for philosophy.

“The whole ancient world was bound to collapse because the progressthat the peoples made in their scientific development necessarily involved thediscovery of the errors on which their religious views were based.”

So, according to the leading article, the whole ancient world perishedbecause scientific research disclosed the errors of the antique religions. Wouldthe ancient world not have perished if research had passed over in silence theerrors of the religions, if the author of the leading article had recommendedto the Roman authorities to cut out Lucretius’s and Lucian’s works?

For the rest, we take the liberty of adding to Mr. H.’s erudition by meansof a note.


Just as the downfall of the ancient world was approaching there arose theschool of Alexandria, which strove to prove by force “the eternal truth” of Greekmythology and its thorough agreement “with the data of scientific research.” TheEmperor Julian also belonged to that trend, which thought it would cause thenew spirit of the times that was asserting itself to disappear if it kept its eyesclosed so as not to see it. But let us keep to Mr. H.’s results! In the religions ofantiquity “the faint notions of the divine were veiled in the deepest night of error”and could therefore not resist scientific research. With Christianity the situationis reversed, as any thinking machine will conclude. Indeed, Mr. H. says:

“The best conclusions of scientific research have so far served only to con-firm the truths of the Christian religion.”

Apart from the fact that every philosophy of the past without exceptionwas accused by the theologians of apostasy, not excepting even the pious Male-branche and the inspired Jakob Böhme, that Leibniz was accused by theBrunswick peasants of being a “Löwenix” (Glaubenichts—one who believes innothing) and by the Englishman Clarke and Newton’s other followers of beingan atheist; apart from the fact that Christianity, as the most capable and con-sistent of the Protestant theologians affirm, cannot agree with reason because“worldly” and “religious” reason contradict each other, which Tertullian clas-sically expressed: “verum est, quia absurdum est”; apart from all this, how canthe agreement of scientific research with religion be proved except by forcingresearch to resolve itself into religion by letting it follow its own course. Theleast we can say is that further compulsion is no proof.

If, of course, you acknowledge beforehand as scientific research only whatconforms to your own view, it is not difficult for you to make prophecies; butthen what advantage has your assertion over that of the Indian Brahmin whoproves the holiness of the Vedas by reserving for himself alone the right to readit!

Yes, says H., “scientific research.” But any research that contradicts Chris-tianity “stops half-way” or “takes a wrong road.” Can one make the argumenteasier for oneself?

Once scientific research “has ‘made clear’ to itself the content of what it hasfound, it will never clash with the truths of Christianity” but at the same timethe state must ensure that this “making clear” is impossible, for research mustnever appeal to the powers of comprehension of the masses, i.e., must neverbecome popular and clear to itself. Even if it is attacked by all the unscientificpapers of the monarchy it must be modest and keep silence.

Christianity precludes the possibility of “any new decadence,” but thepolice must be on its guard so that the philosophizing newspaper writers donot lead to decadence; it must keep an extremely strict guard. Error will be


recognized as such of itself in the struggle with truth, without any need forsuppression by external force; but the state must make the struggle of trutheasier by depriving the champions of “error” not indeed of internal freedom,which it cannot take away from them, but of the possibility of that freedom,the possibility of existence.

Christianity is sure of victory, but according to Mr. H. it is not so sure ofvictory that it can scorn the help of the police.

If from the outset everything which contradicts your faith is error andmust be dealt with as such, what is there to distinguish your claims fromthose of the Mohammedans, from the claims of any other religion? Must phi-losophy adopt different principles for every country, according to the say-ing “different countries, different customs,” in order not to contradict thebasic truths of dogma? Must it believe in one country that 3 (1 = 1, inanother that women have no soul and in yet another that beer is drunk inheaven? Is there not a universal human nature just as there is a universalnature of plants and heavenly bodies? Philosophy asks what is true, notwhat is acknowledged as such, what is true for all men, not what is true forindividuals: philosophy’s metaphysical truths do not know the boundariesof political geography; its political truths know too well where the “bound-aries” begin to confuse the illusory horizon of particular world and nationaloutlooks with the true horizon of the human mind. H. is the weakest of allthe champions of Christianity.

His only proof in favor of Christianity is Christianity’s long existence. Hasnot philosophy also existed from Thales down to our time and has it not pre-cisely now, according to H. himself, greater claims and a greater opinion of itsown importance than ever?

How, finally, does H. prove that the state is a “Christian” state, that insteadof being a free association of moral human beings it is an association of believ-ers, that its purpose, instead of being to make freedom a reality is to makedogma a reality? “Our European states all have Christianity as their foundation.”

The French state too? The Charte, Article 3, says not that “every Christian”or “only the Christian” but “tous les Français are equally eligible for civil andmilitary posts.”

The Prussian Landrecht also says, Part II, Section XIII:“The primary duty of the Supreme Head of the State is to maintain both

internal and external peace and security and to safeguard each and every onein what is his from violence and interference.”

But according to § 1 the Supreme Head of the State combines in his per-son all “duties and rights of the State.” It does not say that the primary dutyof the state is the suppression of heretical errors and bliss in the other world.


If, however, some European states are in fact founded upon Christianity,do those states conform to their conception, is the “pure existence” of a con-dition the right of that condition?

In the view of our H. it is so, for he reminds the supporters of YoungHegelianism “that according to the laws in force in the greater part of the statemarriage not consecrated by the Church is declared concubinage and as such ispunished by the police courts.”

If, therefore, “marriage not consecrated by the Church” is considered onthe Rhine according to the Napoleonic Code as “marriage” and on the Spreeaccording to the Prussian Landrecht as “concubinage,” the “police court” pun-ishment must be an argument for the philosophers that what is right in oneplace is wrong in another, that not the Napoleonic Code but the Landrecht hasthe scientific and moral, the reasonable conception of marriage. This “philos-ophy of police court punishment” may be convincing in other places, it is notconvincing in Prussia. For the rest, how little inclined the Prussian Landrechtis to “holy” marriage is shown by § 12, Part II, Section 1:

“However, a marriage which is allowed by the laws of the Land loses noneof its civil validity by the fact that the dispensation of the spiritual authoritieshas not been requested or has been refused.”

Here in Prussia, too, marriage is partly emancipated from the “spiritualauthorities” and its “civil” validity is distinct from its “ecclesiastical.”

It goes without saying that our great Christian state-philosopher has nota very “high” view of the state.

“Since our states are not only associations based on right, but at the same timetrue educational institutions with the only difference that they extend their careto a broader field than the institutions intended for the education of youth,” etc.,“all public education” is based “on the foundation of Christianity.”

The education of our school children is based just as much on the clas-sics of old and on science in general as on the Catechism.

The state, according to H., is distinguished from a children’s home not bycontent but by size—it extends its “care” to a broader field.

But the true “public education” of the state is rather the reasonable andpublic being of the state; the state itself educates its members by making themmembers of the state, by changing the aims of the individual into generalaims, coarse urge into moral inclination, natural independence into spiritualfreedom, by the individual finding his delight in the life of the whole and thewhole in the disposition of the individual.

The leading article, on the other hand, makes the state not an associationof free human beings mutually educating one another, but a crowd of adults


whose destiny is to be educated from above and to pass from the “narrow”schoolroom to the “broader” one.

This theory of education and guardianship is here brought forward by asupporter of freedom of the press who, in his love for this belle, notes the “neg-ligences of the censorship,” who knows how to depict the “powers of com-prehension of the masses” in the appropriate place (perhaps the powers ofcomprehension of the masses have seemed so precarious to Kölnische Zeitungof late because the masses have forgotten how to appreciate the superioritiesof the “unphilosophical newspaper”?) and who advises scientists to have oneview for the stage and another one for the backstage!

As the leading article showed us its “short” view of the state it will nowexpound to us its low view “of Christianity.”

“All the newspaper articles in the world will never convince a populationthat feels on the whole well and happy that it is in a wretched predicament.”

We should think not! The material feeling of well-being and happiness ismore proof against newspaper articles than the bliss-giving and all-conquer-ing assurance of faith! H. does not sing “Our God is a strong fortress.” Thetruly believing heart of the “masses” is probably more exposed to the rust ofdoubt than the refined worldly culture of the “few.”

H. fears “even incitement to insurrection in a well-ordered state” less thanin a “well-ordered church,” although the latter may besides be led by the“spirit of God” to all truth. A fine believer, and the grounds he has! Politicalarticles are within the comprehension of the masses, he says, but philosoph-ical articles are beyond it!

If, finally, we contrast the leading article’s hint—”the half-measures thathave been taken recently against Young Hegelianism have had the conse-quences half-measures usually have”—to the ingenuous wish that the last stepsof the Hegelians might pass over “without too unfavourable consequences forthem,” we can understand Cornwall’s words in King Lear:

He cannot flatter, he!—An honest man and plain,—he must speak truth:An’ they will take it, so; if not, he’s plain.These kind of knaves I know, which in their plainness

Harbour more craft, and more corrupter ends,Than twenty silly ducking observants,That stretch their duties nicely.

We would think we were insulting the readers of Rheinische Zeitung if we fan-cied they would be satisfied with the comical rather than serious show of a


ci-devant liberal, “a young man of days gone by,” being sent back to where hebelongs; we wish to say a few words about “the matter itself.” As long as wewere engaged in a polemic with the ailing article it would not have been rightto interrupt it in the process of its self-annihilation.

First the question is raised: “Should philosophy discuss religious mattersalso in newspaper articles?”

This question can be answered only by criticizing it.Philosophy, above all German philosophy, has a propensity to solitude, to

systematical seclusion, to dispassionate self-contemplation which opposes itfrom the outset in its estrangement to the quick-witted and alive-to-eventsnewspapers whose only delight is in information. Philosophy, taken in its sys-tematic development, is unpopular; its secret weaving within itself seems tothe layman to be an occupation as overstrained as it is unpractical; it is con-sidered as a professor of magic whose incantations sound pompous becausethey are unintelligible.

Philosophy, in accordance with its character, has never made the first steptowards replacing the ascetic priestly vestments by the light conventional garbof the newspapers. But philosophers do not grow out of the soil like mush-rooms, they are the product of their time and of their people, whose most sub-tle, precious and invisible sap circulates in philosophical ideas. The same spiritthat builds railways by the hands of the workers builds philosophical systemsin the brain of the philosophers. Philosophy does not stand outside the worldany more than man’s brain is outside of him because it is not in his stomach;but, of course, philosophy is in the world with its brain before it stands onthe earth with its feet, whereas many another human sphere has long beenrooted in the earth by its feet and plucks the fruits of the world with its handsbefore it has any idea that the “head” also belongs to the world or that thisworld is the world of the head.

Because every true philosophy is the spiritual quintessence of its time, thetime must come when philosophy not only internally by its content but exter-nally by its appearance comes into contact and mutual reaction with the realcontemporary world. Philosophy then ceases to be a definite system in pres-ence of other definite systems, it becomes philosophy generally, in presenceof the world; it becomes the philosophy of the world of the present. The for-mal features which attest that philosophy has achieved that importance, thatit is the living soul of culture, that philosophy is becoming worldly and theworld philosophical, were the same in all times: any history book will show,repeated with stereotyped fidelity, the simplest rituals which unmistakablymark philosophy’s introduction into drawing-rooms and priests’ studies, theeditorial offices of newspapers and the antechambers of courts, into the hatred


and the love of the people of the time. Philosophy is introduced into the worldby the clamor of its enemies who betray their internal infection by their des-perate appeals for help against the blaze of ideas. These cries of its enemiesmean as much for philosophy as the first cry of a child for the anxious ear ofthe mother, they are the cry of life of the ideas which have burst open theorderly hieroglyphic husk of the system and become citizens of the world. TheCorybantes and Cabiri, who with the roll of drums announce to the world thebirth of baby Zeus, first turn against the religious section of the philosophers,partly because their inquisitorial instinct can secure a firmer hold on this sen-timental side of the public, partly because the public, to which the opponentsof philosophy also belong, can feel the ideal sphere of philosophy only withits ideal feelers, and the only field of ideas in the value of which the publicbelieves almost as much as in the system of material needs is that of religiousideas, and, finally, because religion polemizes not against a definite system ofphilosophy but against the philosophy generally of the definite systems.

The true philosophy of the present does not differ as far as this fate is con-cerned from the true philosophies of the past. Indeed, this fate is a proof thathistory owed to the truth of philosophy.

And for six years the German papers have been drumming against the reli-gious trend in philosophy, calumniating it, distorting it, bowdlerizing it. All-gemeine Augsburger sang bravuras, nearly every overture played the theme thatphilosophy was not worthy of being discussed by the lady sage, that it wasthe idle bragging of youth, a fashion for blasé coteries. But in spite of all thatit could not be got rid of and there was more drumming, for in its anti-philo-sophical caterwauling the Augsburger plays but one instrument, the monoto-nous kettledrum. All German papers, from Berliner politisches Wochenblatt andHamburger Correspondent16 to the obscure local papers, down to KölnischeZeitung blared out about Hegel and Schelling, Feuerbach and Bauer, DeutscheJahrbücher, etc.—Finally the curiosity of the public was aroused and it wantedto see the Leviathan with its own eyes, all the more as semi-official articlesthreatened philosophy that it would have a legal syllabus officially prescribedfor it. And that was when philosophy appeared in the papers. Long had it keptsilence before the self-complacent superficiality which boasted in a few stalenewspaper phrases that it could blow away like soap-bubbles years of studyof genius, the hard-won fruits of self-sacrificing solitude, the results of thatinvisible but slowly extenuating struggle of contemplation; philosophy hadeven protested against the newspapers as being an inappropriate field, but in theend it had to break its silence, it became a newspaper correspondent and—unheard-of diversion!—it suddenly occurred to the garrulous newspaper pur-veyors that philosophy is no food for the newspaper public and they could


not refrain from drawing the attention of the governments to the dishonestyof bringing questions of philosophy and religion into the sphere of the news-papers not to enlighten the public but to attain ulterior aims.

What is there so bad that philosophy could say about religion or aboutitself that your newspaper clamor had not long ago imputed to it in far worseand more frivolous terms? It only needs to repeat what you unphilosophicalCapuchins have preached about it in thousands and thousands of polemics,and it has said the worst.

But philosophy speaks differently of religious and philosophical objectsthan you have. You speak without having studied them, it speaks after study;you appeal to the emotions, it appeals to reason; you curse, it teaches; youpromise heaven and earth, it promises nothing but truth; you demand faithin your faith, it demands not faith in its results but the test of doubt; youfrighten, it calms. And truly, philosophy is world-wise enough to know thatits results flatter the desire for pleasure or the egoism neither of the heavenlynor of the earthly world; but the public that loves truth and knowledge fortheir own sakes will be able to measure itself in judgment and morality withignorant, servile, inconsistent and mercenary scribes.

Admittedly somebody or other, by reason of the worthlessness of his intel-lect or views, may misinterpret philosophy, but do not you Protestants believethat the Catholics misinterpret Christianity, do you not reproach the Christianreligion with the disgraceful times of the eighth and ninth centuries, the nightof St. Bartholomew and the Inquisition? There are conclusive proofs that thehatred of the Protestant theology for philosophers arises largely out of philoso-phy’s tolerance towards the particular confession as such. Feuerbach and Strausswere reproached more for maintaining that Catholic dogmas were Christianthan for stating that the dogmas of Christianity were not dogmas of reason.

But if occasional individuals cannot digest modern philosophy and die ofphilosophical indigestion, that proves no more against philosophy than theoccasional blowing up of a few passengers by the bursting of a boiler provesagainst mechanics.

The question whether philosophical and religious matters should be dis-cussed in newspapers resolves itself in its own emptiness.

If such questions already have an interest for the public as newspaper ques-tions, they have become questions of the day; then the point is not whether theyshould be discussed but where and how they should be discussed, whetherwithin the bounds of the family and the hotels, of the schools and the churches,but not by the press; by the opponents of philosophy, but not by the philoso-phers; whether in the obscure language of private opinion but not in the clar-ifying language of public reason. Then the point is whether what lives in real-


ity belongs to the realm of the press; it is no longer a question of a particularcontent of the press, the question is the general one whether the press mustbe really the press, i.e., a free press.

From the first question we completely separate the second: “Should politicsbe dealt with philosophically by the newspapers in a so-called Christian state?”

If religion becomes a political quality, an object of politics, there seems tobe hardly any need to mention that the newspapers not only may, but must,discuss political objects. It seems from the start that the wisdom of this world,philosophy, has more right to bother about the kingdom of this world, aboutthe state, than the wisdom of the other world, religion. The point here is notwhether the state should be philosophized about, but whether it should bephilosophized about well or badly, philosophically or unphilosophically, withprejudice or without, with consciousness or without, consistently or incon-sistently, in a completely rational or half-rational way. If you make religion atheory of state right, then you make religion itself a kind of philosophy.

Was it not Christianity before anything else that separated church andstate?

Read Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, study the Fathers of the Church andthe spirit of Christianity and then come back and tell us which is the “Chris-tian State,” the church or the state! Does not every minute of your practicallife give the lie to your theory? Do you consider it wrong to appeal to the courtswhen you are cheated? But the apostle writes that that is wrong. Do you offeryour right cheek when you are struck upon the left, or do you not instituteproceedings for assault? Yet the Gospel forbids that. Do you not claim yourreasonable right in this world? Do you not grumble at the slightest raising ofa duty? Are you not furious at the slightest infringement of your personal lib-erty? But you have been told that the sufferings of this life are not to be com-pared with the bliss of the future, that suffering in patience and the bliss ofhope are cardinal virtues.

Are not most of your court proceedings and the majority of civil laws con-cerned with property? But you have been told that your treasure is not of thisworld. If you base yourselves on giving to Caesar the things which are Cae-sar’s and to God the things which are God’s, do not consider the mammon ofgold alone but at least just as much free reason as the Caesar of this world,and the “action of free reason” is what we call philosophizing.

When in the Holy Alliance at first a quasi-religious alliance of states wasto be formed and religion was to be the state motto of Europe, the Pope showedprofound sense and perfect consistence in refusing to join it, for in his viewthe universal Christian link between nations was the Church and not diplo-macy, not a worldly alliance of states.


The truly religious state is the theocratic state; the prince of such statesmust be either the God of religion, Jehovah himself, as in the Jewish state; God’srepresentative, the Dalai Lama, as in Tibet; or finally, as Görres correctlydemands of Christian states in his last work, they must all submit to a churchwhich is an “infallible church.” For if, as in Protestantism, there is no supremehead of the church, the domination of religion is nothing but the religion ofdomination, the cult of the will of the government.

Once a state includes several confessions with equal rights it cannot be areligious state without violating particular confessions; it cannot be a churchwhich condemns adherents of another confession as heretics, which makesevery piece of bread dependent on faith, which makes dogma the link betweenseparate individuals and existence as citizens of the state. Ask the Catholicinhabitants of “poor green Erin,” ask the Huguenots before the French Revo-lution: they did not appeal to religion, for their religion was not the religionof the state; they appealed to the “Rights of Humanity” and philosophy inter-prets the Rights of Humanity and demands that the state be the state of humannature.

But the half, the limited, rationalism, which is as unbelieving as it is the-ological, says that the universal Christian spirit, irrespective of confessional dif-ferences, must be the spirit of the state! It is the greatest irreligiousness, thewantonness of worldly reason, to separate the general spirit of religion fromthe positive religion; this separation of religion from its dogmas and institu-tions is equal to asserting that the universal spirit of right must reign in thestate irrespective of the definite laws and the positive institutions of right.

If you presume to stand so high above religion as to have the right to sep-arate the general spirit of religion from its positive definitions, what reproachhave you to make to the philosophers if they want to make the separation com-plete and not a half-way one, if they proclaim not the Christian, but the humanspirit, the universal spirit of religion?

Christians live in states with differing constitutions, some in a republic,some in an absolute, some again in a constitutional monarchy. Christianity doesnot decide on the correctness of the constitutions, for it knows no distinctionbetween constitutions, it teaches, as religion must: Submit to the authority, forall authority is ordained by God. The correctness of state constitutions is, there-fore, to be judged not according to Christianity, not according to the nature,the essence of the state itself, not according to the nature of Christian society,but according to the nature of human society.

The Byzantine state was the properly religious state, for there dogmas werematters of state, but the Byzantine state was the worst of all states. The states


of the ancien régime were the most Christian states, nonetheless they werestates of “the will of court.”

There is a dilemma that “sound” common sense cannot solve. Either theChristian state corresponds to the concept of the state as a realization of rationalfreedom, and then nothing else can be demanded for it to be a Christian statethan that it be a reasonable state; then it is enough to develop the state out ofthe reason of human relations, a work accomplished by philosophy. Or thestate of rational freedom cannot be developed out of Christianity: then youwill yourselves concede that this development does not lie in the tendency ofChristianity, for Christianity does not wish for a bad state, and any state whichis not the embodiment of rational freedom is a bad state.

Answer the dilemma as you like, you will have to concede that the stateis not to be constituted from religion but from the reason of freedom. Onlythe crassest ignorance can assert that the theory of making the state-conceptindependent is a passing whim of modern philosophers.

Philosophy has done nothing in politics that physics, mathematics, medicine,every science, has not done within its own sphere. Bacon of Verulam declaredtheological physics to be a virgin vowed to God and barren; he emancipatedphysics from theology and she became fruitful. You have no more to ask the politi-cian if he has faith than the doctor. Immediately before and after the time of Coper-nicus’s great discoveries on the true solar system the law of gravitation of the statewas discovered: the center of gravity of the state was found within the state itself.As various European governments tried to apply this result with the initial super-ficiality of practice to the system of equilibrium of states, similarly Macchiavelliand Campanella began before them and Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hugo Grotius after-wards down to Rousseau, Fichte and Hegel, to consider the state with the eye ofman and to develop its natural laws from reason and experience, not from the-ology, any more than Copernicus let himself be influenced by Joshua’s supposedcommand to the sun to stand still over Gideon and the moon over the vale ofAjalon. Modern philosophy has only continued a work already started by Hera-clitus and Aristotle. So it is not the reason of modern philosophy that you arepolemizing against, but the ever modern philosophy of reason. Naturally, the igno-rance that yesterday or perhaps the day before discovered in Rheinische or Königs-berger Zeitung the age-old ideas on the state considers the ideas of history asnotions which occurred overnight to certain individuals because they appear newto it and came to it overnight; it forgets that it has assumed the old role of thedoctor of Sorbonne who considered it his duty to accuse Montesquieu in publicbecause the latter was frivolous enough to maintain that the political quality, notthe virtue of the Church, was the highest quality in the state; it forgets that it has


assumed the role of Joachim Lange, who denounced Wolf because his doctrineof predestination would lead to desertion among soldiers and thereby to a relax-ation of military discipline and finally to the collapse of the state; lastly it forgetsthat the Prussian Landrecht comes from the very school of philosophy of “thatWolf” and the Napoleonic Code comes not from the Old Testament but from theschool of ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeu, and Montesquieu andfrom the French Revolution. Ignorance is a demon and we are afraid it will yetplay us more than one tragedy; the greatest Greek poets were right when theyrepresented it in the terrible dramas of the royal houses of Mycenae and Thebesas tragic fate.

Whereas the earlier teachers of state law construed the state out of ambi-tion or sociability, or even reason, though not out of the reason of society butrather out of the reason of the individual, the more ideal and profound viewof modern philosophy construes it out of the idea of the whole. It considersthe state as the great organism in which freedom of right, of morals and ofpolitics has to be implemented and in which in the laws of the state the indi-vidual citizen merely obeys the natural laws of his own reason, human rea-son. Sapienti sat [“sufficient for the wise man”].

We shall conclude with a further philosophical farewell to Kölnische Zeitung.It was reasonable of it to take to itself a liberal “of times gone by.” One canmost comfortably be both liberal and reactionary at the same time, if only oneis always skilful enough to address only liberals of the recent past who knowno other dilemma than that of Vidocq—”prisoner or gaoler.” It was still morereasonable that the liberal of the recent past combated the liberals of the pres-ent. Without parties there is no development, without a parting there is noprogress. We hope that with the leading article of No. 179 Kölnische Zeitunghas begun a new era, the era of character.

“ON THE JEWISH QUESTION” (1843)

Marx had been reading about the French and American revolutions andbecame convinced that neither produced true human emancipation butonly freed individuals to pursue their own self-interests in society. Theessay is sometimes cited as evidence of Marx’s anti-Semitism. But it isreally a criticism of religion in general for focusing upon the private life ofindividuals rather than the emancipation of public life, of life in work andsociety. By this time (1843) Marx fully identified himself with the cause ofsocialism, a public stance that caused his exile to Paris.


BRUNO BAUER, THE JEWISH QUESTION, BRUNSWICK, 1843

The German Jews want emancipation. What sort of emancipation do theywant? Civil, political emancipation.

Bruno Bauer answers them: No one in Germany is politically emancipated.We ourselves are not free. How are we to liberate you? You Jews are egoists ifyou demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. You should workas Germans for the political emancipation of Germany and as men for theemancipation of mankind, and you should look upon the particular form ofoppression and shame which you experience not as an exception to the rulebut rather as a confirmation of it.

Or do the Jews want to be put on an equal footing with Christian subjects?If so, they are recognizing the Christian state as legitimate, they are recogniz-ing the regime of general enslavement. Why should their particular yoke notplease them when they are pleased to accept the general yoke? Why shouldthe German be interested in the liberation of the Jew when the Jew is not inter-ested in the liberation of the German?

The Christian state only knows privileges. In it the Jew has the privilege ofbeing a Jew. As a Jew he has rights which the Christian does not have. Whydoes he want rights he does not have and which Christians enjoy?

If the Jew wants to be emancipated from the Christian state, then he isdemanding that the Christian state give up its religious prejudice. But does theJew give up his religious prejudice? Does he have the right, then, to demandof someone else that he renounce his religion?

The Christian state is by its very nature incapable of emancipating the Jew;but, Bauer adds, the Jew by his very nature cannot be emancipated. As longas the state is Christian and the Jew Jewish, they are both equally incapableof either giving or receiving emancipation.

The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the manner of theChristian state, that is, by granting him as a privilege the right to separate him-self off from the other subjects but subjecting him to the pressure of the otherseparate spheres. He experiences this pressure all the more intensely since asa Jew he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew him-self can behave only like a Jew towards the state, i.e. treat it as something for-eign, for he opposes his chimerical nationality to actual nationality, his illu-sory law to actual law, he considers himself entitled to separate himself fromhumanity, he refuses on principle to take any part in the movement of history,he looks forward to a future which has nothing in common with the future ofmankind as a whole, and he sees himself as a member of the Jewish peopleand the Jewish people as the chosen people.

“On the Jewish Question” (1843) 45

BRUNO BAUER, THE JEWISH QUESTION, BRUNSWICK, 1843THE JEWISH QUESTION

On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account ofyour religion? It is the deadly enemy of the religion of the state. As citizens?There are no citizens in Germany. As men? You are not men, any more thanthose to whom you appeal.

After criticizing previous positions and solutions, Bauer poses the ques-tion of Jewish emancipation in a new way. What, he asks, is the nature of theJew who is to be emancipated and the Christian state which is to emancipatehim? He answers with a critique of the Jewish religion, he analyses the reli-gious opposition between Judaism and Christianity and he explains the essenceof the Christian state, all this with dash, perception, wit, and thoroughness ina style as precise as it is pithy and trenchant.

How then does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? Toformulate a question is to answer it. To make a critique of the Jewish ques-tion is to answer the Jewish question. We shall therefore sum up as follows:

We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.The most rigid form of opposition between Jew and Christian is the reli-

gious opposition. How does one resolve an opposition? By making it impos-sible. How does one make a religious opposition impossible? By abolishing reli-gion. Once Jew and Christian recognize their respective religious as nothingmore than different stages in the development of the human spirit, as snake-skinscast off by history, and man as the snake which wore them, they will no longerbe in religious opposition, but in a purely critical and scientific, a human rela-tionship. Science will then be their unity. But oppositions in science are resolvedby science itself.

The German Jew in particular suffers from the general lack of politicalemancipation and the pronounced Christianity of the state. For Bauer, how-ever, the Jewish question has a universal significance which is independent ofthe specific German conditions. It is the question of the relationship of reli-gion and state, of the contradiction between religious prejudice and political eman-cipation. Emancipation from religion is presented as a condition both for theJew who wants to be politically emancipated and for the state which is to eman-cipate him and itself be emancipated.

“Very well,” you say, and the Jew himself says it, “the Jew should not beemancipated because he is a Jew, because he has such an admirable code ofuniversally human ethical principles. Rather, the Jew will recede behind thecitizen and be a citizen, in spite of the fact that he is a Jew and is to remain aJew; i.e., he is and remains a Jew in spite of the fact that he is a citizen andlives in universal human conditions: his Jewish and restricted nature alwaystriumphs in the long run over his human and political obligations. The prej-


udice remains, even though it is overtaken by universal principles. But if itremains, it is more likely to overtake everything else.”

“The Jew could only remain a Jew in political life in a sophistical sense, inappearance; if he wanted to remain a Jew, the mere appearance would there-fore be the essential and would triumph, i.e. his life in the state would be noth-ing more than an appearance or a momentary exception to the essential natureof things and to the rule.”

Now let us see how Bauer formulates the role of the state.“France,” he says, “recently provided us, in connection with the Jewish

question (as she constantly does in all other political questions), with theglimpse of a life which is free but which revokes its freedom by law, thus declar-ing it to be a mere appearance, and on the other hand denies its free lawthrough its actions.”

“Universal freedom is not yet law in France and the Jewish question is notyet settled because legal freedom—the equality of all citizens—is restricted inactual life, which continues to be dominated and fragmented by religious priv-ileges, and because the lack of freedom in actual life reacts on the law and forcesit to sanction the division of what are intrinsically free citizens into oppressedand oppressors.”

So when would the Jewish question be settled in France?“The Jew, for example, would have stopped being a Jew if he did not allow

his [religious] laws to prevent him from fulfilling his duties to the state andto his fellow citizens, for example, if he went to the Chamber of Deputies onthe Sabbath and took part in the public proceedings. All religious privileges,including the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolishedand if some or many or even the overwhelming majority still considered themselvesobliged to fulfil their religious duties, then this should be left to them as a purelyprivate affair.” “There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any priv-ileged religion. Deprive religion of its powers of excommunication and it ceasesto exist.” “Just as M. Martin du Nord saw the proposal to omit all mention ofSunday in the law as a declaration that Christianity has ceased to exist, withthe same right (and this right is well founded) the declaration that the law ofthe Sabbath is no longer binding on the Jew would be a proclamation of thedissolution of Judaism.”

So Bauer demands on the one hand that the Jew give up Judaism and thatman in general give up religion in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On theother hand, it logically follows that for him the political abolition of religionamounts to the abolition of religion as a whole. The state which presupposesreligion is not yet a true, a real state.


“Admittedly the idea of religion gives the state some guarantees. But whatstate? What sort of state?”

It is at this point that the one-sidedness of Bauer’s treatment of the Jewishquestion emerges.

It was in no way sufficient to ask who should emancipate and who beemancipated. It was necessary for the critique to ask a third question: Whatkind of emancipation is involved? What are the essential conditions of the eman-cipation which is required? Only the critique of political emancipation itselfwould constitute a definitive critique of the Jewish question itself and its trueresolution into the “general question of the age.”

Because Bauer fails to raise the question to this level, he falls into con-tradictions. He poses conditions which are not essential to political emanci-pation itself. He raises questions which are not contained within the prob-lem and he solves problems which leave his question unanswered. WhenBauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation: “Their only mistakewas to presuppose that the Christian state was the only true one and not tosubject it to the same criticism as Judaism,” his own mistake lies clearly inthe fact that he subjects only the “Christian state” to criticism, and not the“state as such,” that he fails to examine the relationship between political eman-cipation and human emancipation and that he therefore poses conditions whichcan be explained only by his uncritical confusion of political emancipationand universally human emancipation. Bauer asks the Jews: Do you from yourstandpoint have the right to demand political emancipation? We pose the ques-tion the other way round: Does the standpoint of political emancipation havethe right to demand from the Jews the abolition of Judaism and from manthe abolition of religion?

The form in which the Jewish question is posed differs according to thestate in which the Jew finds himself. In Germany, where there is no politicalstate, no state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological question. TheJew is in religious opposition to the state, which acknowledges Christianity asits foundation. This state is a theologian ex professo. Criticism is here criticismof theology, double-edged criticism, criticism of Christian and of Jewish the-ology. But we are still moving in the province of theology, however criticallywe may be moving in it.

In France, in the constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question ofconstitutionalism, a question of the incompleteness of political emancipation.Since the appearance of a state religion is preserved here in the formula—albeitan insignificant and self-contradictory one—of a religion of the majority, the rela-tionship of the Jew to the state also retains the appearance of a religious, the-ological opposition.


Only in the free states of North America—or at least in some of them—does the Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a trulysecular question. Only where the political state exists in its fully developed formcan the relationship of the Jew and of religious man in general to the politi-cal state, i.e., the relationship of religion and state, appear in its characteristicand pure form. The criticism of this relationship ceases to be a theological crit-icism as soon as the state ceases to relate itself in a theological way to religion,as soon as the state relates to religion as a state, i.e., politically. Criticism thenbecomes criticism of the political state. At this point, where the question ceasesto be theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to be critical.

“In the United States there is neither a state religion nor an officially pro-claimed religion of the majority, nor the predominance of one faith overanother. The state is foreign to all faiths.” There are even some states in NorthAmerica where “the constitution does not impose religious beliefs or practiceas a condition of political privileges.” Nevertheless, “people in the UnitedStates do not believe that a man without religion can be an honest man.”

And yet North America is the land of religiosity par excellence, as Beaumont,Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton all assure us. However, we are usingthe North American states only as an example. The question is: What is therelationship between complete political emancipation and religion? If in theland of complete political emancipation we find not only that religion exists butthat it exists in a fresh and vigorous form, that proves that the existence of reli-gion does not contradict the perfection of the state. But since the existence ofreligion is the existence of a defect, the source of this defect must be looked forin the nature of the state itself. We no longer see religion as the basis but sim-ply as a phenomenon of secular narrowness. We therefore explain the religiousrestriction on the free citizens from the secular restriction they experience. Wedo not mean to say that they must do away with their religious restriction inorder to transcend their secular limitations. We do not turn secular questionsinto theological questions. We turn theological questions into secular questions.History has been resolved into superstition for long enough. We are now resolv-ing superstition into history. The question of the relationship of political emanci-pation to religion becomes for us the question of the relationship of political eman-cipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of thepolitical state by criticizing the political state in its secular construction, regard-less of its religious weaknesses. We humanize the contradiction between the stateand a particular religion, for example Judaism, by resolving it into the contra-diction between the state and particular secular elements, and we humanize thecontradiction between the state and religion in general by resolving it into thecontradiction between the state and its own general presuppositions.


The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, the religious man ingeneral, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, fromreligion in general. The state emancipates itself from religion in a form and man-ner peculiar to its nature as state by emancipating itself from the state religion,i.e., by acknowledging no religion, by instead acknowledging itself as state.Political emancipation from religion is not complete and consistent emanci-pation from religion, because political emancipation is not the complete andconsistent form of human emancipation.

The limitations of political emancipation are immediately apparent fromthe fact that the state can liberate itself from a restriction without man him-self being truly free of it, that a state can be a free state without man himselfbeing a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he poses the follow-ing condition for political emancipation:

“All religious privileges, including the monopoly of a privileged church,would have to be abolished and if some or many or even the overwhelmingmajority still considered themselves obliged to fulfill their religious duties, then thisshould be left to them as a purely private affair.”

Therefore the state can have emancipated itself from religion even if theoverwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority doesnot cease to be religious by being religious in private.

But the attitude of the state, especially the free state, to religion is still onlythe attitude to religion of the men who make up the state. It therefore followsthat man liberates himself from a restriction through the medium of the state,in a political way, by transcending this restriction in an abstract and restrictedmanner, in a partial manner, in contradiction with himself. It also follows thatwhen man liberates himself politically he does so in a devious way, through amedium, even though the medium is a necessary one. Finally it follows that evenwhen man proclaims himself an atheist through the mediation of the state, i.e.,when he proclaims the state an atheist, he still remains under the constraintsof religion because he acknowledges his atheism only deviously, through amedium. Religion is precisely that: the devious acknowledgement of man,through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and man’sfreedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all hisdivinity, all his religious constraints, so the state is the intermediary to whichman transfers all his non-divinity, all his human unconstraint.

The political elevation of man above religion shares all the shortcomingsand all the advantages of political elevation in general. For example, the stateas state annuls private property, man declares in a political way that private prop-erty is abolished, immediately the property qualification is abolished for activeand passive election rights, as has happened in many North American states.


Hamilton interprets this fact quite correctly from the political standpoint: “Themasses have gained a victory over the property owners and financial wealth.” Is notprivate property abolished in an ideal sense when the propertyless come tolegislate for the propertied? The property qualification is the last political formto recognize private property.

And yet the political annulment of private property does not mean the abo-lition of private property; on the contrary, it even presupposes it. The state inits own way abolishes distinctions based on birth, rank, education, and occu-pation when it declares birth, rank, education, and occupation to be non-polit-ical distinctions, when it proclaims that every member of the people is anequal participant in popular sovereignty regardless of these distinctions, whenit treats all those elements which go to make up the actual life of the peoplefrom the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless the state allows private prop-erty, education, and occupation to act and assert their particular nature in theirown way, i.e., as private property, as education and as occupation. Far fromabolishing these factual distinctions, the state presupposes them in order toexist, it only experiences itself as political state and asserts its universality inopposition to these elements. Hegel therefore defines the relationship of thepolitical state to religion quite correctly when he says:

In order for the state to come into existence as the self-knowing ethical actual-ity of spirit, it is essential that it should be distinct from the form of authorityand of faith. But this distinction emerges only in so far as divisions occur inthe ecclesiastical sphere itself. It is only in this way that the state, above theparticular churches, has attained to the universality of thought—its formal prin-ciple—and is bringing this universality into existence.

Of course! It is only in this way, above the particular elements, that the stateconstitutes itself as universality.

The perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in oppo-sition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continueto exist outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as qualities of civilsociety. Where the political state has attained its full degree of developmentman leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in hismind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in the political community,where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he isactive as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself toa means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the polit-ical state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth.The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it inthe same way as religion overcomes the restriction of the profane world, i.e.


it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it, and allow itself to be dominated byit. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, wherehe regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illu-sory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered tobe a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, heis divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.

The conflict in which the individual believer in a particular religion findshimself with his own citizenship and with other men as members of the com-munity is reduced to the secular division between the political state and civilsociety. For man as bourgeois [a member of civil society] “life in the state is noth-ing more than an appearance or a momentary exception to the essential natureof things and to the rule.” Of course the bourgeois, like the Jew, only takes partin the life of the state in a sophistical way, just as the citoyen only remains aJew or a bourgeois in a sophistical way; but this sophistry is not personal. Itis the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the religiousman and the citizen is the difference between the tradesman and the citizen,between the day-laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the cit-izen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction whichexists between religious man and political man is the same as exists betweenthe bourgeois and the citoyen, between the member of civil society and hispolitical lion’s skin.

This secular conflict to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces itself—the relationship of the political state to its presuppositions, whether they bematerial elements, like private property, etc., or spiritual ones, like education,religion, the conflict between the general interest and the private interest, the splitbetween the political state and civil society—these secular oppositions Bauerdoes not touch, but polemicizes instead against their religious expression:

It is precisely its foundation—the need that assures civil society its existence andguarantees its necessity—that exposes it to constant dangers, maintains an ele-ment of uncertainty in it and brings forth that restless alternation of wealth andpoverty, need and prosperity which constitutes change in general.

Compare the whole section “Civil Society,” which broadly follows the mainfeatures of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Civil society in its opposition to thepolitical state is recognized as necessary because the political state is recog-nized as necessary.

Political emancipation is certainly a big step forward. It may not be the lastform of general human emancipation, but it is the last form of human eman-cipation within the prevailing scheme of things. Needless to say, we are herespeaking of real, practical emancipation.


Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from theprovince of public law to that of private law. It is no longer the spirit of thestate where man behaves—although in a limited way, in a particular form anda particular sphere—as a species-being, in community with other men. It hasbecome the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism and of the bellum omniumcontra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of dif-ference. It has become the expression of the separation of man from his com-munity, from himself, and from other men, which is what it was originally. Itis now only the abstract confession of an individual oddity, of a private whim,a caprice. The continual splintering of religion in North America, for exam-ple, already gives it the external form of a purely individual affair. It has beenrelegated to the level of a private interest and exiled from the real community.But it is important to understand where the limit of political emancipation lies.The splitting of man into his public and his private self and the displacement ofreligion from the state to civil society is not one step in the process of politi-cal emancipation but its completion. Hence political emancipation neither abol-ishes nor tries to abolish man’s real religiosity.

The dissolution of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religiousman and citizen, is not a denial of citizenship or an avoidance of political eman-cipation: it is political emancipation itself, it is the political way of emancipatingoneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as politi-cal state comes violently into being out of civil society and when human self-liberation attempts to realize itself in the form of political self-liberation, thestate can and must proceed to the abolition of religion, to the destruction of reli-gion; but only in the same way as it proceeds to the abolition of private prop-erty (by imposing a maximum, by confiscation, by progressive taxation) andthe abolition of life (by the guillotine). At those times when it is particularlyself-confident, political life attempts to suppress its presupposition, civil soci-ety and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real, harmonious species-life of man. But it only manages to do this in violent contradiction to the con-ditions of its own existence, by declaring the revolution permanent, and forthat reason the political drama necessarily ends up with the restoration of reli-gion, private property, and all the elements of civil society, just as war endswith peace.

Indeed, the perfected Christian state is not the so-called Christian statewhich recognizes Christianity as its foundation, as the state religion, and whichtherefore excludes other religions. The perfected Christian state is rather theatheist state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to the levelof the other elements of civil society. The state which is still theological, whichstill officially professes the Christian faith, which still does not dare to declare


itself a state, has not yet succeeded in expressing in secular, human form, in itsreality as state, the human basis of which Christianity is the exaggerated expres-sion. The so-called Christian state is simply the non-state, since it is only thehuman basis of the Christian religion, and not Christianity as a religion, whichcan realize itself in real human creations.

The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state, but iscertainly not the political realization of Christianity. The state which still pro-fesses Christianity in the form of religion does not yet profess it in a politicalform, for it still behaves towards religion in a religious manner, i.e. it is not thetrue realization of the human foundation of religion because it continues toaccept the unreality and the imaginary form of this human core. The so-calledChristian state is the imperfect state and Christianity serves as supplement andsanctification of this imperfection. Therefore religion necessarily becomes ameans for the state, which is a hypocritical state. A perfected state which countsreligion as one of its presuppositions on account of the deficiency which existsin the general nature of the state is not at all the same thing as an imperfect statewhich declares religion its foundation on account of the deficiency which liesin its particular existence as a deficient state. In the latter case religion becomesimperfect politics. In the former, the imperfection even of perfected politics man-ifests itself in religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religionto complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the true state, does not needreligion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can discard religion,because in it the human foundation of religion is realized in a secular way. Theso-called Christian state, on the other hand, behaves in a political way towardsreligion and in a religious way towards politics. In the same way as it demeanspolitical forms to mere appearances, it demeans religion to a mere appearance.

In order to make this opposition clearer let us consider Bauer’s construc-tion of the Christian state, a construction which derives from his study of theChristian–Germanic state.

Bauer says:

In order to prove the impossibility or the non-existence of the Christian state, peo-ple have recently been making frequent references to those passages in theGospel which the [present] state not only does not observe but also cannotobserve unless it wishes to dissolve itself entirely [as a state].

But the matter is not settled so easily. What do those passages in the Gospeldemand? Supernatural self-denial, submission to the authority of revelation,turning away from the state and the abolition of secular relationships. But theChristian state demands and accomplishes all these things. It has made the spiritof the Gospel its own, and if it does not reproduce it in the same words that theGospel uses, this is because it is expressing that spirit in political forms, thatis, in forms which are borrowed from the political system of this world but are


reduced to mere appearances in the religious rebirth they are forced to undergo.This turning away from the state realizes itself through political forms.

Bauer goes on to show how the people in a Christian state are in fact a non-people with no will of their own and how their true existence resides in theruler to whom they are subjected and who is, by origin and by nature, aliento them, i.e. given to them by God without their agreement. He also showshow the laws of this people are not their own creation but actual revelations;how the supreme ruler needs privileged intermediaries in his relations withthe real people, with the masses; how the masses themselves disintegrate intoa multitude of distinct spheres formed and determined by chance, differenti-ated by their interests, their particular passions and prejudices, and allowedas a privilege to seclude themselves from one another, etc.But Bauer himself says:

Politics, if it is to be nothing more than religion, can no longer be called pol-itics, just as washing dishes, if it is to take on a religious significance, can nolonger be called housework.

But in the Christian–Germanic state religion is an “economic matter” just as“economic matters” are religion. In the Christian–Germanic state the domi-nance of religion is the religion of dominance.

The separation of the “spirit of the Gospel” from the “letter of the Gospel”is an irreligious act. The state which allows the Gospel to speak in the lan-guage of politics or in any other language than the language of the Holy Ghostcommits a sacrilegious act, if not in human eyes, then at least in its own reli-gious eyes. The state which acknowledges Christianity as its supreme law andthe Bible as its charter must be measured against the words of the Holy Scrip-ture, for the Scripture is holy even in its words. This state, like the human debrisupon which it is based, becomes involved in a painful contradiction, a con-tradiction which from the standpoint of religious consciousness is insupera-ble, when we refer it to those passages in the Gospel which it “not only doesnot observe but also cannot observe unless it wishes to dissolve itself entirely as astate.” And why does it not want to dissolve itself entirely? It is not capable ofanswering either others or itself on this point. In its own consciousness the offi-cial Christian state is an ought whose realization is impossible; it cannot con-vince itself of the reality of its own existence except through lies and thereforeremains in its own eyes a perpetual object of doubt, an unreliable and prob-lematic object. Criticism therefore has every justification in forcing the statewhich bases itself on the Bible into intellectual disarray in which it no longerknows whether it is illusion or reality and in which the infamy of its secularends—for which religion serves as a cover—comes into irreconcilable conflict


with the integrity of its religious consciousness, which sees religion as the aimof the world. This state can free itself from its inner torment only by becom-ing the bailiff of the Catholic Church. In the face of this Church, which declaresthe secular power to be its servant, the state—the secular power which claimsto rule over the religious spirit—is powerless.

In the so-called Christian state it is estrangement [Entfremdung] which carriesweight, and not man himself. The only man who carries weight, the king, is specif-ically distinct from other men: he is still religious and is in direct communionwith Heaven, with God. The relationships which prevail here are still relation-ships of faith. This means that the religious spirit is not yet truly secularized.

But the religious spirit can never be truly secularized, for what is it but theunsecular form of a stage in the development of the human spirit? The reli-gious spirit can be realized only in so far as that stage in the development ofthe human spirit of which it is the religious expression emerges and consti-tutes itself in its secular form. This happens in the democratic state. Not Chris-tianity but the human foundation of Christianity is the foundation of thisstate. Religion remains the ideal, unsecular consciousness of its membersbecause it is the ideal form of the stage of human development which has beenreached in this state.

The members of the political state are religious because of the dualismbetween individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society andpolitical life. They are religious inasmuch as man considers political life, whichis far removed from his actual individuality, to be his true life and inasmuchas religion is here the spirit of civil society and the expression of the separa-tion and distance of man from man. Political democracy is Christian inasmuchas it regards man—not just one man but all men—as a sovereign and supremebeing; but man in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, man in his contingent exis-tence, man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold,and exposed to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements by the entireorganization of our society—in a word, man who is not yet a true species-being.The sovereignty of man—but of man as an alien being distinct from actualman—is the fantasy, the dream, the postulate of Christianity, whereas indemocracy it is a present and material reality, a secular maxim.

In a perfected democracy the religious and theological consciousnessregards itself as all the more religious and all the more theological since it isapparently without any political significance or earthly aims, an unworldly andspiritual affair, an expression of the inadequacy of reason, the product ofcaprice and fantasy, an actualization of the life to come. Christianity hereachieves the practical expression of its universal religious significance in thatthe most disparate outlooks come together in one group in the form of Chris-


tianity. Moreover, it demands of no one that he accept Christianity, but sim-ply that he accept religion in general, any religion. The religious conscious-ness revels in a wealth of religious opposition and religious diversity.

We have therefore shown that political emancipation from religion allows reli-gion—but not privileged religion—to continue in existence. The contradictionin which the adherent of a particular religion finds himself in relation to his cit-izenship is only one aspect of the general secular contradiction between the politicalstate and civil society. The final form of the Christian state is one which recognizesitself as state and disregards the religion of its members. The emancipation of thestate from religion is not the emancipation of actual man from religion.

Therefore we do not tell the Jews that they cannot be emancipated polit-ically without radically emancipating themselves from Judaism, which is whatBauer tells them. We say instead: the fact that you can be politically emanci-pated without completely and absolutely renouncing Judaism shows that polit-ical emancipation by itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews want to bepolitically emancipated without emancipating yourselves as humans, theincompleteness and the contradiction lies not only in you but in the natureand the category of political emancipation. If you are ensnared within this cat-egory, then your experience is a universal one. In the same way as the stateevangelizes when, although a state, it adopts the attitude of a Christian towardsthe Jew, the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civil rights.

But if man, although a Jew, can be politically emancipated and acquire civilrights, can he claim and acquire the rights of man? In Bauer’s view he cannot:

The question is whether the Jew as such, i.e. the Jew who himself admits thathe is compelled by his true nature to live in eternal separation from others, iscapable of acquiring and granting to others the universal rights of man.

The idea of the rights of man was not discovered in the Christian world untilthe last century. It is not innate in man. On the contrary, it can only be won ina struggle against the historical traditions in which man has up to now beeneducated. Therefore the rights of man are not a gift of nature or a legacy of pre-vious history, but the prize of the struggle against the accident of birth and theprivileges which history has handed down from generation to generation. Theyare the product of culture, and only he can possess them who has earned themand deserved them.

But can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew therestricted nature that makes him a Jew will inevitably gain the ascendancy overthe human nature which should join him as a man to other men; the effect willbe to separate him from non-Jews. He declares through this separation that theparticular nature which makes him a Jew is his true and highest nature in theface of which human nature is forced to yield.

In the same way the Christian as Christian cannot grant the rights of man.


According to Bauer man must sacrifice the “privilege of faith” in order to be ina position to receive the universal rights of man. Let us consider for onemoment these so-called rights of man. Let us consider them in their mostauthentic form—the form they have among those who discovered them, theNorth Americans and the French! These rights of man are partly political rights,rights which are only exercised in community with others. What constitutestheir content is participation in the community, in the political community orstate. They come under the category of political freedom, of civil rights, whichas we have seen by no means presupposes the consistent and positive aboli-tion of religion and therefore of Judaism. It remains for us to consider the otheraspect, the droits de l’homme [rights of man] as distinct from the droits du citoyen[rights of the citizen].

Among them we find freedom of conscience, the right to practice one’s cho-sen religion. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized, either as one of therights of man or as a consequence of one of these rights, namely freedom.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1791, Article 10: “No oneis to be molested on account of his convictions, even his religious convictions.”In Title 1 of the Constitution of 1791 the following is guaranteed as one of therights of man: “the liberty of every man to practice the religion he professes.”

The Declaration of the Rights of Man etc., 1793, counts among the rights ofman, Article 7: “Liberty of worship.” What is more, it even says, in connec-tion with the right to publish views and opinions, to assemble and to practicereligion, that “the need to enunciate these rights supposes either the presenceor the recent memory of despotism.” Compare the Constitution of 1795, TitleXIV, Article 354.

Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, §3: “All men have received fromnature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dic-tates of their consciences and no one can of right be compelled to follow, toinstitute or to support against his will any religion or religious ministry. Nohuman authority can under any circumstances whatsoever intervene in ques-tions of conscience and control the powers of the soul.”

Constitution of New Hampshire, Articles 5 and 6: “Among the natural rights,some are by their very nature inalienable because they cannot be replaced byanything equivalent. The rights of conscience are of this sort.”

The incompatibility of religion with the rights of man is so alien to the con-cept of the rights of man that the right to be religious—to be religious in what-ever way one chooses and to practice one’s chosen religion—is expressly enu-merated among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man.

The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the citizen.Who is this man who is distinct from the citizen? None other than the mem-


ber of civil society. Why is the member of civil society simply called “man” andwhy are his rights called the rights of man? How can we explain this fact? Bythe relationship of the political state to civil society, by the nature of politicalemancipation.

The first point we should note is that the so-called rights of man, as distinctfrom the rights of the citizen, are quite simply the rights of the member of civilsociety, i.e. of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the com-munity. Consider the most radical constitution, the Constitution of 1793:

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

Article 2. These rights (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, lib-erty, security, property.

What is liberty?Article 6. “Liberty is the power which belongs to man to do anything that

does not harm the rights of others,” or according to the Declaration of theRights of Man of 1791: “Liberty consists in being able to do anything whichdoes not harm others.”

Liberty is therefore the right to do and perform everything which does notharm others. The limits within which each individual can move without harm-ing others are determined by law, just as the boundary between two fields isdetermined by a stake. The liberty we are here dealing with is that of man asan isolated monad who is withdrawn into himself. Why does Bauer say thatthe Jew is incapable of acquiring the rights of man?

“As long as he is a Jew the restricted nature which makes him a Jew willinevitably gain the ascendancy over the human nature which should join himas a man to other men; the effect will be to separate him from non-Jews.”

But the right of man to freedom is not based on the association of man withman but rather on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this sep-aration, the right of the restricted individual, restricted to himself.

The practical application of the right of man to freedom is the right of manto private property.

What is the right of man to private property?Article 16 (Constitution of 1793): “The right of property is that right which

belongs to each citizen to enjoy and dispose at will of his goods, his revenuesand the fruit of his work and industry.”

The right to private property is therefore the right to enjoy and dispose ofone’s resources as one wills, without regard for other men and independentlyof society: the right of self-interest. The individual freedom mentioned above,


together with this application of it, forms the foundation of civil society. It leadseach man to see in other men not the realization but the limitation of his ownfreedom. But above all it proclaims the right of man “to enjoy and dispose atwill of his goods, his revenues and the fruit of his work and industry.”

There remain the other rights of man, equality and security.Equality, here in its non-political sense, simply means equal access to lib-

erty as described above, namely that each man is equally considered to be aself-sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1795 defines the concept of thisequality, in keeping with this meaning, as follows:

Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the fact that the lawis the same for everyone, whether it protects or whether it punishes.”

And security?Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection

accorded by society to each of its members for the conservation of his person,his rights and his property.”

Security is the supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of police,the concept that the whole of society is there only to guarantee each of its mem-bers the conservation of his person, his rights, and his property. In this senseHegel calls civil society “the state of need and of reason.”

The concept of security does not enable civil society to rise above its ego-ism. On the contrary, security is the guarantee of its egoism.

Therefore not one of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man,man as a member of civil society, namely an individual withdrawn into him-self, his private interest, and his private desires, and separated from the com-munity. In the rights of man it is not man who appears as a species-being; onthe contrary, species—life itself, society, appears as a framework extraneous tothe individuals, as a limitation of their original independence. The only bondwhich holds them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, theconservation of their property, and their egoistic persons.

It is a curious thing that a people which is just beginning to free itself, totear down all the barriers between the different sections of the people and tofound a political community, that such a people should solemnly proclaim therights of egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the commu-nity (Declaration of 1791), and even repeat this proclamation at a time whenonly the most heroic devotion can save the nation and is for that reason press-ingly required, at a time when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil societybecomes the order of the day and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Dec-laration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793.) This fact appears even more curiouswhen we observe that citizenship, the political community, is reduced by thepolitical emancipators to a mere means for the conservation of these so-called


rights of man and that the citizen is therefore proclaimed the servant of ego-istic man; that the sphere in which man behaves as a communal being [Gemein-wesen] is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he behaves as a par-tial being, and finally that it is man as bourgeois, i.e., as a member of civil society,and not man as citizen who is taken as the real and authentic man.

“The goal of all political association is the conservation of the natural andimprescriptible rights of man” (Declaration of the Rights of Man etc., 1791, Arti-cle 2). “Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment ofhis natural and imprescriptible rights” (Declaration etc., 1793, Article 1).

Thus even during the ardor of its youth, urged on to new heights by thepressure of circumstances, political life declares itself to be a mere means whosegoal is the life of civil society. True, revolutionary practice is in flagrant con-tradiction with its theory. While, for example, security is declared to be one ofthe rights of man, the violation of the privacy of letters openly becomes the orderof the day. While the “unlimited freedom of the press” (Constitution of 1793,Article 122) is guaranteed as a consequence of the right to individual freedom,the freedom of the press is completely destroyed, for “the freedom of the pressshould not be permitted when it compromises public freedom.” This thereforemeans that the right to freedom ceases to be a right as soon as it comes intoconflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is simply the guaran-tee of the rights of man, the rights of individual man, and should be abandonedas soon as it contradicts its goal, these rights of man. But practice is only theexception and theory is the rule. Even if we were to assume that the relation-ship is properly expressed in revolutionary practice, the problem still remainsto be solved as to why the relationship is set upon its head in the minds of thepolitical emancipators so that the end appears as the means and the means asthe end. This optical illusion present in their minds would continue to posethe same problem, though in a psychological and theoretical form.

But there is a straightforward solution.Political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the old society

on which there rested the power of the sovereign, the political system[Staatswesen] as estranged from the people. The political revolution is the rev-olution of civil society. What was the character of the old society? It can becharacterized in one word: feudalism. The old civil society had a directly polit-ical character, i.e. the elements of civil life such as property, family, and themode and manner of work were elevated in the form of seignory, estate, andguild to the level of elements of political life. In this form they defined the rela-tionship of the single individual to the state as a whole, i.e. his political rela-tionship, his relationship of separation and exclusion from the other compo-nents of society. For the feudal organization of the life of the people did not


elevate property or labor to the level of social elements but rather completed theirseparation from the state as a whole and constituted them as separate societieswithin society. But the functions and conditions of life in civil society were stillpolitical, even though political in the feudal sense, i.e. they excluded the indi-vidual from the state as a whole, they transformed the particular relationship ofhis guild to the whole state into his own general relationship to the life of thepeople, just as they transformed his specific civil activity and situation into hisgeneral activity and situation. As a consequence of this organization, the unityof the state, together with the consciousness, the will, and the activity of the unityof the state, the universal political power, likewise inevitably appears as the spe-cial concern of a ruler and his servants, separated from the people.

The political revolution which overthrew this rule and turned the affairsof the state into the affairs of the people, which constituted the political stateas a concern of the whole people, i.e. as a real state, inevitably destroyed allthe estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges which expressed the separa-tion of the people from its community. The political revolution thereby abol-ished the political character of civil society. It shattered civil society into its sim-ple components—on the one hand individuals and on the other the materialand spiritual elements which constitute the vital content and civil situation ofthese individuals. It unleashed the political spirit which had, as it were, beendissolved, dissected, and dispersed in the various cul-de-sacs of feudal soci-ety; it gathered together this spirit from its state of dispersion, liberated itfrom the adulteration of civil life and constituted it as the sphere of the com-munity, the universal concern of the people ideally independent of those par-ticular elements of civil life. A person’s particular activity and situation in lifesank to the level of a purely individual significance. They no longer consti-tuted the relationship of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairsas such became the universal affair of each individual and the political func-tion his universal function.

But the perfection of the idealism of the state was at the same time the per-fection of the materialism of civil society. The shaking-off of the political yokewas at the same time the shaking-off of the bonds which had held in checkthe egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was at the same timethe emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of auniversal content.

Feudal society was dissolved into its foundation [Grund], into man. Butinto man as he really was its foundation—into egoistic man.

This man, the member of civil society, is now the foundation, the presup-position of the political state. In the rights of man the state acknowledges himas such.


But the freedom of egoistic man and the acknowledgement of this free-dom is rather the acknowledgement of the unbridled movement of the spiri-tual and material elements which form the content of his life.

Hence man was not freed from religion—he received the freedom of reli-gion. He was not freed from property—he received the freedom of property.He was not freed from the egoism of trade—he received the freedom to engagein trade.

The constitution of the political state and the dissolution of civil society intoindependent individuals—who are related by law just as men in the estatesand guilds were related by privilege—are achieved in one and the same act. Butman, as member of civil society, inevitably appears as unpolitical man, as nat-ural man. The rights of man appear as natural rights, for self-conscious activ-ity is concentrated upon the political act. Egoistic man is the passive and merelygiven result of the society which has been dissolved, an object of immediatecertainty, and for that reason a natural object. The political revolution dissolvescivil society into its component parts without revolutionizing these parts andsubjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, oflabor, of private interests, and of civil law, as the foundation of its existence, asa presupposition which needs no further grounding, and therefore as its nat-ural basis. Finally, man as he is a member of civil society is taken to be thereal man, man as distinct from citizen, since he is man in his sensuous, indi-vidual, and immediate existence, whereas political man is simply abstract, arti-ficial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Actual man is acknowledgedonly in the form of the egoistic individual and true man only in the form ofthe abstract citizen.

Rousseau’s description [in The Social Contract] of the abstraction of thepolitical man is a good one:

Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people’s institutions must feelhimself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature, of transforming each indi-vidual, who in himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greaterwhole from which he somehow receives his life and his being, of substitutinga partial and moral existence for physical and independent existence. He musttake man’s own powers away from him and substitute for them alien ones whichhe can only use with the assistance of others.

All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to manhimself.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to themember of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the otherto the citizen, the moral person.


Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himselfand as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, hisindividual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recog-nized and organized his forces propres [“own forces”] as social forces so that socialforce is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only thenwill human emancipation be completed.

BRUNO BAUER, “THE CAPACITY OF PRESENT-DAY JEWS AND

CHRISTIANS TO BECOME FREE,” EINUNDZWANZIG BOGEN AUS

DER SCHWEIZ, PP. 56–71

Bauer deals in this form with the relation between the Jewish and Chris-tian religions, as well as their relation to criticism. Their relation to criticism istheir relation “to the capacity to become free.”

His conclusion is:

The Christian has only one hurdle to overcome, namely, his religion, in orderto dispense with religion altogether, and hence to become free. The Jew, on theother hand, does not only have to break with his Jewish nature; he also has tobreak with the development towards the completion of his religion, a devel-opment which has remained alien to him.

Thus Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation into a purelyreligious question. The theological problem as to who has the better chance ofgaining salvation—Jew or Christian—is here repeated in a more enlightenedform: who is the more capable of emancipation? The question is no longer: whichgives freedom, Judaism or Christianity? Rather it is the reverse: which gives morefreedom, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?

If they wish to become free, the Jews should not embrace Christianity butChristianity in dissolution and more generally religion in dissolution, i.e.enlightenment, criticism, and its product—free humanity.

It is still a matter of embracing a religion for the Jew. It is no longer a questionof Christianity, but of Christianity in dissolution.

Bauer demands of the Jew that he break with the essence of the Christianreligion—a demand which, as he himself says, does not proceed from thedevelopment of the Jewish nature.

Since Bauer, at the end of his Jewish Question, represented Judaism as noth-ing more than a crude religious criticism of Christianity, and therefore gave it“only” a religious significance, it was clear in advance that he would also trans-form the emancipation of the Jews into a philosophico-theological act.


BRUNO BAUER, “THE CAPACITY OF PRESENT-DAY JEWS AND CHRISTIANS TO BECOME FREE,” DER SCHWEIZ, PP. 56–71

EINUNDZWANZIG BOGEN AUSDER SCHWEIZ

Bauer sees the ideal and abstract essence of the Jew, his religion, as hiswhole essence. He is therefore right to conclude: “The Jew gives nothing tohumanity when he lays aside his limited law,” when he abolishes all hisJudaism.

According to this the relationship of Jews and Christians is as follows: theonly interest Christians have in the emancipation of the Jews is a generalhuman and theoretical interest. Judaism is an offensive fact for the religious eyeof the Christian. As soon as his eye ceases to be religious, this fact ceases tobe offensive. The emancipation of the Jews is in and for itself not the task ofthe Christian.

However, if the Jew wants to liberate himself, he has to complete not onlyhis own task but also the task of the Christian—the Critique of the EvangelicalHistory of the Synoptics [by Bruno Bauer] and the Life of Jesus, etc.[by DavidFriedrich Strauss].

“They must see to it themselves: they will determine their own destiny;but history does not allow itself to be mocked.”

We will try to avoid looking at the problem in a theological way. For us thequestion of the Jews’ capacity for emancipation is transformed into the ques-tion: what specific social element must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism?For the capacity of the present-day Jew for emancipation is the relation ofJudaism to the emancipation of the present-day world. This relation flowsinevitably from the special position of Judaism in the enslaved world of today.

Let us consider the real secular Jew—not the sabbath Jew, as Bauer does,but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the Jew’s secret in his religion: rather let us look for thesecret of religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular God?

Money.Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money, i.e. from practi-

cal, real Judaism, would be the same as the self-emancipation of our age.An organization of society that abolished the basis upon which haggling

exists, i.e. the possibility of haggling, would have made the Jew impossible.His religious consciousness would vanish like an insipid haze in the vital airof society. On the other hand, when the Jew recognizes this his practical natureas null and works to abolish it, he is working outwards from his previouscourse of development in the direction of general human emancipation and turn-ing against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

We therefore recognize in Judaism the presence of a universal and con-temporary anti-social element whose historical evolution—eagerly nurtured by


the Jews in its harmful aspects—has arrived at its present peak, a peak atwhich it will inevitably disintegrate.

The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation ofmankind from Judaism.

The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way.

The Jew, who is merely tolerated in Vienna, for example, determines the fateof the whole empire through the financial power he possesses. The Jew, whocan be without rights in the smallest of the German states, decides the fate ofEurope. While the corporations and the guilds exclude him or are not yet will-ing to look upon him with favor, the audacity of his industry mocks the obsti-nacy of medieval institutions.

This is not an isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish waynot only by acquiring financial power but also because through him and apartfrom him money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit hasbecome the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emanci-pated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews.

For example, Captain Hamilton informs us that the pious and politicallyfree inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoön who does not make eventhe slightest effort to free himself from the snakes that are choking him. Mam-mon is his idol and he prays to him not only with his lips but with all the powerof his body and his soul. For him the world is nothing but a Stock Exchangeand he is convinced that his sole vocation here on earth is to get richer thanhis neighbors. He is possessed by the spirit of bargaining and the only way hecan relax is by exchanging objects. When he travels it is as if he carried hisshop and office on his back and spoke of nothing but interest and profit. Ifhe takes his eyes off his own business for a moment, it is simply so that hecan poke his nose into someone else’s.

Indeed, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world isexpressed in such an unambiguous and natural fashion in North America thatthe very proclamation of the Gospel, Christian teaching, has become a com-mercial object and the bankrupt businessman is just as likely to go into evan-gelizing as the successful evangelist into business.

“The man you see at the head of a respectable congregation started out asa businessman; his business failed so he became a minister; the other startedout as a priest, but as soon as he had saved some money he left the pulpit forbusiness. In many people’s eyes the religious ministry is a veritable industrialcareer.”

In Bauer’s view it is “a dishonest state of affairs when in theory the Jew isdeprived of political rights while in practice he possesses enormous power


and exercises a political influence in the larger sphere that is denied him asan individual.”

The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and hispolitical rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power in gen-eral. Ideally speaking the former is superior to the latter, but in actual fact itis in thrall to it.

Judaism has kept going alongside Christianity not simply as a religious cri-tique of Christianity and an embodiment of doubts about the religious originsof Christianity but also because the practical Jewish spirit, Judaism, has man-aged to survive in Christian society and has even reached its highest level ofdevelopment there. The Jew, who is a particular member of civil society, is onlythe particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society.

Judaism has managed to survive not despite history but through it.Civil society ceaselessly begets the Jew from its own entrails.What was the essential basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.The monotheism of the Jew is therefore in reality the polytheism of the

many needs, a polytheism that makes even the lavatory an object of divinelaw. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society and appears as suchin all its purity as soon as civil society has fully brought forth the political state.The god of practical need and self-interest is money.

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand.Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities.Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has thereforedeprived the entire world—both the world of man and of nature—of its spe-cific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; thisalien essence dominates him and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has been secularized and become the god of the world.Exchange is the true god of the Jew. His god is nothing more than illusoryexchange.

The view of nature which has grown up under the regime of private prop-erty and of money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation ofnature which does exist in the Jewish religion but only in an imaginary form.

In this sense Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable that “all creatures havebeen made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plantson the earth—all living things must also become free.”

What is present in an abstract form in the Jewish religion—contempt fortheory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself—is the actual and con-scious standpoint, the virtue, of the man of money. The species-relation itself,the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes a commercial object!Woman is put on the market.


The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, ofthe man of money in general.

The ungrounded and unfounded law of the Jew is only the religious car-icature of ungrounded and unfounded morality and law in general, of thepurely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.

Here too the supreme relation of man is the legal relation, the relation tolaws which apply to him not because they are the laws of his own will andnature but because they dominate him and because breaches of them wouldbe avenged.

Jewish Jesuitry, the same practical Jesuitry that Bauer finds in the Talmud,is the relationship of the world of self-interest to the laws that dominate it; thewily circumvention of those laws constitutes the principal skill of that world.

Indeed, the motion of that world within its laws is necessarily a continualsupersession [Aufhebung] of the law.

Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop furthertheoretically, because the world-view of practical need is by nature narrow-minded and rapidly exhausted.

The religion of practical need could not by its very nature find its com-pletion in theory but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice.

Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new cre-ations and conditions of the world into the province of its own activity, sincepractical need, whose understanding is only at the level of self-interest, is pas-sive and incapable of extending itself in directions of its own choosing; instead,it finds itself extended in line with the development of social conditions them-selves.

Judaism reaches its peak with the completion of civil society; but civil soci-ety first reaches its completion in the Christian world. Only under the rule ofChristianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical rela-tionships external to man, could civil society separate itself completely frompolitical life, tear apart all the species-bonds of man, substitute egoism andselfish need for those bonds, and dissolve the human world into a world ofatomistic individuals confronting each other in enmity.

Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has now dissolved back into Judaism.The Christian was from the very beginning the theorizing Jew. The Jew is

therefore the practical Christian and the practical Christian has once againbecome a Jew.

Christianity overcame real Judaism only in appearance. It was too refined,too spiritual, to do away with the crudeness of practical need except by rais-ing it into celestial space.


Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism and Judaism is the vulgarapplication of Christianity. But this application could not become universaluntil Christianity as perfected religion had theoretically completed the self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature.

Only then could Judaism attain universal domination and turn alienatedman and alienated nature into alienable, saleable objects subject to the slaveryof egoistic need and to the market.

Selling is the practice of alienation [Die Veräusserung ist die Praxis derEntäusserung]. As long as man is restrained by religion he can objectify hisessence only by making it into an alien, fantastic being. In the same way, whenunder the sway of egoistic need he can act practically and practically produceobjects only by making his products and his activity subordinate to an aliensubstance and giving them the significance of an alien substance—money.

Translated into practice, the Christian egoism of eternal happinessinevitably becomes the material egoism of the Jew, celestial need becomes ter-restrial need, and subjectivism becomes self-interest. We can explain the tenac-ity of the Jew not from his religion but from the human foundation of his reli-gion, from practical need and egoism.

Since the real essence of the Jew is universally realized and secularized incivil society, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his reli-gious essence, which is nothing more than the ideal expression of practicalneed. Therefore not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud but also in pres-ent-day society we find the essence of the modern Jew not in an abstract butin a supremely empirical form, not only as the narrowness of the Jew but asthe Jewish narrowness of society.

As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence ofJudaism—the market and the conditions which give rise to it—the Jew willhave become impossible, for his consciousness will no longer have an object,the subjective basis of Judaism—practical need—will have become human-ized, and the conflict between man’s individual sensuous existence and hisspecies-existence will have been superseded.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society fromJudaism.


L ike many other living things we humans are conscious beings.But human consciousness is characterized by a high degree of self-reflexivity, anintense self-awareness. Marx put it this way: “Man is not only a natural being, he isa human natural being. That is, he is a being for himself and hence a species-being;as such he must confirm and express himself as much in history as in his knowing.”1

This claim that we, as a species, are characterized not simply by thought but bythought-in-action will be crucial. And there is more. Like other living things, inorder to live we must be in constant contact with the material world around us. Wemust breathe and eat and drink. Besides being conscious creatures, we are neces-sarily and always sensuous and tactile. Our human life activity—our way of subsist-ing—is both sensuous and self-reflexive. And that is what Marx means by “produc-tivity”: “Man can be distinguished from the animal by consciousness, religion, oranything else you please. He begins to distinguish himself from the animal themoment he begins to produce his means of subsistence.”2

That reality is displayed by the fact that we humans make and use tools. Thetool expresses our active, conscious, purposive way of subsisting–and the tool alsoconnects us to the material world. The tool symbolizes consciousness and sensu-ousness in dialectical relationship. Like other animals, we began our journey as

71

P A R T II

Consciousness and theMaterial World

hunters and gatherers. But we hunted with a spear or dug for roots with a stick.We relate to the givenness of the material world upon which we depend not pas-sively (adjusting to it) but actively; we transform the world through our work withtools. And in transforming the world around us we transform our awareness of thatworld. Consciousness is always consciousness of something that is not itself. It isan “in itself” thrown back upon itself that then becomes a “for itself”—and thusaware of itself. It is not “in the mind” but in this conscious-sensuous-tactile spacethat ideas take shape and find a place. Marx:

Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., but these are real, activemen, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productiveforces . . . Consciousness can never be anything else except conscious existence,and the existence of men in their actual life-process.3

In saying that, Marx sets himself apart from the idealism of Hegel for whomconsciousness-as-such, an awareness aware of itself, is the ultimate. For Hegel, thehighest form of human activity, of human freedom, is distanced from the world; itis critical consciousness pulling back into itself. At the same time Marx also distin-guishes himself from the materialism of Feuerbach, and what Marx found to beFeuerbach’s passive, merely contemplative relation to the material world, where“sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or perception, but not assensuous human activity, practice [Praxis].” Marx continues, “Feuerbach, not satis-fied with abstract thinking [as in Hegel], wants contemplation; but he does notcomprehend sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”4 To be human is to be productive. It is to have and express conscious, sensuous life activity, totransform the world and “to see ourselves in a world we have made.”

This complaint against philosophers like Hegel and Feuerbach is at the samemoment a complaint against religion. Religion arises out of our active, consciousspecies-being. It is an act of protest, an act of opposition to all that degrades anddenies us. Religion, for Marx, is both a suffering and a crying out against that suf-fering. This is what he saw in the religious devotion of the German working classand poor. But religion, Marx thought, resolves itself into a mere explanation of thatsuffering (a dogma) or a mere religious ritual (a practice) that makes that sufferingsufferable. Like an opiate, it covers over the suffering without actually removing it.In this respect, Marx was far closer than he realized to the complaint broughtagainst religion by the Hebrew prophets who railed against the establishmentdevotion to temple ritual by the priests, who sought security and comfort in piouspractices rather than in the struggle for justice.

Indeed, for Marx struggle is at the heart of the human enterprise. As conscious,self-reflexive creatures, we are destined to struggle, destined to alienation, and tostruggle to overcome alienation. Here Marx follows Hegel closely. We “alienate” our-

72 Part II: Consciousness and the Material World

selves: We put ourselves into the world through our work, but then we must strug-gle against the givenness of that already established world. We must negate it asan object that confronts us and seems finished and closed. By “alienation” Hegeland Marx mean not a subjective feeling but an objective relationship to the world.Here is a quote from Marx on what he and Hegel have in common. It is very tightlyworded, but in a word it says it all.

The importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result—the dialectic ofnegativity as the moving and producing principle—lies in the fact that Hegelconceives the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of object[Entgegenstandlichung], as alienation and as supersession of this alienation; thathe therefore grasps the nature of labor and conceives objective man—true,because real man—as the result of his own labor.5

Through our labor, our conscious life activity, we humans are constantly trans-forming the world upon which we depend for our subsistence. We pour ourselvesout into that world; we alienate ourselves from ourselves; through our work webuild ourselves into the objective world. But then we must negate that alienationand reassert our own active relationship to the world. In this process of alienationand of supersession we transform not only the world around us but we transformourselves—our thoughts, our conceptions, and how we concretely live in that worldwith others. For Marx this puts human work at the very center of our way of beingas human creatures.

Still, as workers, we almost never experience our work as life-creating and life-transforming. Instead, we are forced to “go to work” to “make a living.” We competewith other workers to make a wage. In order to live we must buy back what asworkers we have made. We never feel at home when we are at work, and only feelat home when we are not at work. We are estranged from our species being. Marx:

The more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien,objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, thepoorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him. It isthe same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains withinhimself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongsto him, but to the object . . . and begins to confront him as an autonomouspower.6

What workers must do, therefore, is struggle to take back into their own controlthe means of production, and in so doing enter consciously into their conscious,engaged, and sensuous life activity.

Having reached that conclusion Marx will thenceforth turn his attention awayfrom philosophy and away from religion, and focus his analysis upon politicaleconomy—its institutions and justifying ideologies. The purpose of human life is not

Part II: Introduction 73

to understand but to understand in order to change, because change is whatthrough our work we are in fact constantly doing. And what we are changing isultimately ourselves as a still evolving and unfinished species.

The writings of Marx in this section reflect his fundamental view of our humanspecies and of our species-specific way of dwelling on Earth. He arrives at thisposition in dialogue with both Hegel and Feuerbach. In distinguishing himself fromtheir views and asserting the dialectical relationship of consciousness and sensu-ousness in human life activity, Marx also establishes his criticism of religion as afalse or inverted consciousness. Marx puts it this way:

In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth,here one ascends from earth to heaven. . . . To arrive at man in the flesh, onedoes not set out from what men say, imagine, or conceive. . . . Rather one setsout from real, active men and their actual life process.7

In saying this, Marx shows that besides Hegel and Feuerbach there is anotherimportant interpreter of the story of life on Earth with whom he is in direct conver-sation, and that is Charles Darwin. Darwin saw that all life has evolved and isevolving from simple to ever more diverse and complex life forms, and that processhas been driven by vast struggle. Marx hoped and believed he had solved the sec-ond puzzle—of how human life-in-society had evolved and changed over time. Andin this social evolution it is human labor, not Nature and Natural Selection, that isthe driving force. That is why this section on “Consciousness and the MaterialWorld” will be followed by a section called “Bad Work/Good Work.” For Marx, wehumans misunderstand our work when we say we “go to work.” We are instead theunfinished and still evolving product of our work.

NOTES

1. “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy,” p. 84.2. “The German Ideology—Ideology in General,” p. 95.3. Ibid., p. 99.4. “Concerning Feuerbach,” p. 183.5. “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy,” p. 80.6. “Estranged Labor,” p. 119.7. “The German Ideology—Ideology in General,” p. 100.


“CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S DIALECTIC AND GENERAL PHILOSOPHY” (1844)

With his writing of this essay Marx establishes his dialectical materialismby distinguishing it from Hegel and Feuerbach, even as he borrows fromboth. Against Hegelian idealism he asserts Feuerbach’s emphasis upon thehuman as sensuous, material, and tactile. But he accuses Feuerbach of anabstract individualism and turns again to Hegel’s grasp upon the humanas a social and historical being. In this essay Marx comes to his fullunderstanding of the nature and meaning of human labor, namely thatwe humans (as a still evolving species) are the final product of our work.We also find Marx introducing the notion of “suffering” and struggle,themes he will return to in his criticism of religion.

This is perhaps the place to make a few remarks, by way of explana-tion and justification, about the Hegelian dialectic, both in general,

and in particular as expounded in the Phenomenology and Logic, as well as aboutits relation to the modern critical movement.

Modern German criticism was so preoccupied with the old world and soentangled during the course of its development with its subject-matter that ithad a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticism and was com-pletely unaware of the seemingly formal but in fact essential question of howwe now stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic. The lack of awareness aboutthe relation of modern criticism to Hegelian philosophy in general and to thedialectic in particular has been so pronounced that critics like Strauss andBruno Bauer are still, at least implicitly, imprisoned within Hegelian logic, thefirst completely so and the second in his Synoptiker (where, in opposition toStrauss, he substitutes the “self-consciousness” of abstract man for the sub-stance of abstract nature) and even in his Das entdeckte Christentum. For exam-ple, in Das entdeckte Christentum we find the following passage:

As if self-consciousness, in positing the world, that which is different, and inproducing itself in that which it produces, since it then does away with the dif-ference between what it has produced and itself and since it is only in the pro-ducing and in the movement that it is itself—as if it did not have its purposein this movement,

etc. Or again:

They (the French Materialists) could not yet see that the movement of the uni-verse only really comes to exist for itself and enters into unity with itself as themovement of self-consciousness.

“Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy” (1844) 75

These expressions are not even different in their language from the Hegelianconception. They reproduce it word for word.

How little awareness there was of the relation to Hegel’s dialectic while thiscriticism was under way (Bauer’s Synoptiker), and how little even the completedcriticism of the subject-matter contributed to such an awareness, is clear fromBauer’s Gute Sache der Freiheit, where he dismisses Herr Gruppe’s impertinent ques-tion “and now what will happen to logic?” by referring him to future Critics.

But now that Feuerbach, both in his “Thesen” in the Anekdota and ingreater detail in his Philosophie der Zukunft, has destroyed the foundations ofthe old dialectic and philosophy, that very school of Criticism, which wasitself incapable of taking such a step but instead watched while it was taken,has proclaimed itself the pure, resolute, absolute Criticism which has achievedself-clarity, and in its spiritual pride has reduced the whole process of historyto the relation between the rest of the world, which comes into the categoryof the “masses,” and itself. It has assimilated all dogmatic antitheses into theone dogmatic antithesis between its own sagacity and the stupidity of theworld, between the critical Christ and mankind—the “rabble.” It has daily andhourly demonstrated its own excellence against the mindlessness of the massesand has finally announced that the critical Day of Judgement is drawing near,when the whole of fallen humanity will be arrayed before it and divided intogroups, whereupon each group will receive its certificate of poverty. The schoolof Criticism has made known in print its superiority to human feelings andthe world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing butan occasional roar of sarcastic laughter from its Olympian lips. After all thesedelightful capers of idealism (Young Hegelianism) which is expiring in the formof Criticism, it (the critical school) has not once voiced so much as a suspi-cion of the need for a critical debate with its progenitor, the Hegelian dialec-tic. It has not even indicated a critical attitude to Feuerbach’s dialectic. A com-pletely uncritical attitude towards itself.

Feuerbach is the only person who has a serious and a critical attitude tothe Hegelian dialectic and who has made real discoveries in this field. He isthe true conqueror of the old philosophy. The magnitude of his achievementand the quiet simplicity with which he presents it to the world are in markedcontrast to the others.

Feuerbach’s great achievement is:(1) To have shown that philosophy is nothing more than religion brought

into thought and developed in thought, and that it is equally to be condemnedas another form and mode of existence of the estrangement of man’s nature.

(2) To have founded true materialism and real science by making the socialrelation of “man to man” the basic principle of his theory.


(3) To have opposed to the negation of the negation, which claims to bethe absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself and positivelygrounded in itself.

Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic, and in so doing justifies takingthe positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting-point, in the fol-lowing way:

Hegel starts out from the estrangement of substance (in logical terms: fromthe infinite, the abstractly universal), from the absolute and fixed abstraction.In ordinary language, he starts out from religion and theology.

Secondly, he supersedes the infinite and posits the actual, the sensuous,the real, the finite, the particular. (Philosophy as supersession of religion andtheology.)

Thirdly, he once more supersedes the positive, and restores the abstrac-tion, the infinite. Restoration of religion and theology.

Feuerbach therefore conceives the negation of the negation only as a con-tradiction of philosophy with itself, as philosophy which affirms theology(supersession, etc.) after having superseded it and hence affirms it in opposi-tion to itself.

The positing or self-affirmation and self-confirmation present in the nega-tion of the negation is regarded as a positing which is not yet sure of itself,which is still preoccupied with its opposite, which doubts itself and there-fore stands in need of proof, which does not prove itself through its own exis-tence, which is not admitted. It is therefore directly counterposed to thatpositing which is sensuously ascertained and grounded in itself. (Feuerbachsees negation of the negation, the concrete concept, as thought which sur-passes itself in thought and as thought which strives to be direct awareness,nature, reality.)

But since he conceives the negation of the negation from the aspect of thepositive relation contained within it as the true and only positive and fromthe aspect of the negative relation contained within it as the only true act andself-realizing act of all being, Hegel has merely discovered the abstract, logi-cal, speculative expression of the movement of history. This movement of his-tory is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, it is simply the processof his creation, the history of his emergence. We shall explain both the abstractform of this movement and the difference between Hegel’s conception of thisprocess and that of modern criticism as formulated in Feuerbach’s Das Wesendes Christentums or rather, the critical form of a movement which in Hegel isstill uncritical.

Let us take a look at Hegel’s system. We must begin with his Phenomenol-ogy, which is the true birthplace and secret of the Hegelian philosophy.


Phenomenology

A. Self-consciousness

I. Consciousness. (a) Certainty in sense experience, or the “this” andmeaning. (b) Perception or the thing with its properties and illusion. (c)Power and understanding, phenomena and the super-sensible world.

II. Self-consciousness. The truth of certainty of oneself. (a) Independenceand dependence of self-consciousness, lordship and servitude. (b) Freedomof self-consciousness. Stoicism, scepticism, the unhappy consciousness.

III. Reason. Certainty and truth of reason. (a) Observational reason;observation of nature and of self-consciousness, (b) Realization ofrational self-consciousness through itself. Pleasure and necessity. Thelaw of the heart and the madness of self-conceit. Virtue and the way ofthe world. (c) Individuality which is real in and for itself. The spiritualanimal kingdom and deception or the thing itself. Legislative reason.Reason which tests laws.

B. Mind.

I. True mind, morality.

II. Self-estranged mind, culture.

III. Mind certain of itself, morality.

C. Religion.

Natural religion, the religion of art, revealed religion.

D. Absolute knowledge

Hegel’s Encyclopaedia begins with logic, with pure speculative thought, and endswith absolute knowledge, with the self-conscious, self-comprehending philo-sophical or absolute mind, i.e. super-human, abstract mind. In the same way,the whole of the Encyclopaedia is nothing but the extended being of philo-sophical mind, its self-objectification; and the philosophical mind is nothingbut the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement, i.e.conceiving itself abstractly. Logic is the currency of the mind, the speculativethought-value of man and of nature, their essence which has become com-pletely indifferent to all real determinateness and hence unreal, alienatedthought, and therefore thought which abstracts from nature and from realman; abstract thought. The external character of this abstract thought . . . natureas it is for this abstract thought. Nature is external to it, its loss of self; it graspsnature externally, as abstract thought, but as alienated abstract thought. Finallymind, which is thought returning to its birthplace and which as anthropolog-


ical, phenomenological, psychological, moral, artistic-religious mind is notvalid for itself until it finally discovers and affirms itself as absolute knowledgeand therefore as absolute, i.e. abstract mind, receives its conscious and appro-priate existence. For its real existence is abstraction.

Hegel commits a double error.The first appears most clearly in the Phenomenology, which is the birthplace

of Hegelian philosophy. When, for example, Hegel conceives wealth, the powerof the state, etc., as entities estranged from the being of man, he conceives themonly in their thought form . . . They are entities of thought, and therefore sim-ply an estrangement of pure, i.e. abstract, philosophical thought. Therefore theentire movement ends with absolute knowledge. What these objects areestranged from and what they confront with their claim to reality is noneother than abstract thought. The philosopher, himself an abstract form ofestranged man, sets himself up as the yardstick of the estranged world. Theentire history of alienation and the entire retraction of this alienation is there-fore nothing more than the history of the production of abstract, i.e. absolute,thought, of logical, speculative thought. Estrangement, which thus forms thereal interest of this alienation and its supersession, is the opposition of in itselfand for itself, of consciousness and self consciousness, of object and subject, i.e. theopposition within thought itself of abstract thought and sensuous reality orreal sensuousness. All other oppositions and the movements of these opposi-tions are only the appearance, the mask, the exoteric form of these two oppo-sites which are alone important and which form the meaning of these other,profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the human essence objectifies itselfin an inhuman way, in opposition to itself, but that it objectifies itself in distinctionfrom and in opposition to abstract thought, which constitutes the essence ofestrangement as it exists and as it is to be superseded.

The appropriation of man’s objectified and estranged essential powers istherefore firstly only an appropriation which takes place in consciousness, in purethought, i.e. in abstraction. In the Phenomenology, therefore, despite its thor-oughly negative and critical appearance and despite the fact that its criticismis genuine and often well ahead of its time, the uncritical positivism andequally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works, the philosophical dissolu-tion and restoration of the empirical world, is already to be found in latentform, in embryo, as a potentiality and a secret. Secondly, the vindication ofthe objective world for man—e.g. the recognition that sensuous consciousnessis not abstractly sensuous consciousness, but humanly sensuous conscious-ness; that religion, wealth, etc., are only the estranged reality of human objec-tification, of human essential powers born into work, and therefore only theway to true human reality—this appropriation, or the insight into this process,


therefore appears in Hegel in such a way that sense perception, religion, thepower of the state, etc., are spiritual entities, for mind alone is the true essenceof man, and the true form of mind is the thinking mind, the logical, specula-tive mind. The humanity of nature and of nature as produced by history, ofman’s products, is apparent from the fact that they are products of abstract mindand therefore factors of the mind, entities of thought. The Phenomenology is there-fore concealed and mystifying criticism, criticism which has not attained self-clarity; but in so far as it grasps the estrangement of man—even though manappears only in the form of mind—all the elements of criticism are concealedwithin it, and often prepared and worked out in a way that goes far beyondHegel’s own point of view. The “unhappy consciousness,” the “honest con-sciousness,” the struggle of the “noble and base consciousness,” etc. etc., theseseparate sections contain the critical elements—but still in estranged form—of entire spheres, such as religion, the state, civil life, and so forth. Just as theentity, the object, appears as a thought-entity, so also the subject is always con-sciousness or self-consciousness; or rather, the object appears only as abstract con-sciousness and man only as self-consciousness. The various forms of estrange-ment which occur are therefore merely different forms of consciousness andself-consciousness. Since abstract consciousness, which is how the object isconceived, is in itself only one moment in the differentiation of self-con-sciousness, the result of the movement is the identity of self-consciousness andconsciousness, absolute knowledge, the movement of abstract thought nolonger directed outwards but proceeding only within itself; i.e., the result isthe dialectic of pure thought.

The importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result—the dialec-tic of negativity as the moving and producing principle—lies in the fact thatHegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss ofobject [Entgegenständlichung], as alienation and as supersession of this alien-ation; that he therefore grasps the nature of labor and conceives objectiveman—true, because real man—as the result of his own labor. The real, activerelation of man to himself as a species-being, or the realization of himself asa real species-being, i.e. as a human being, is only possible if he really employsall his species-powers—which again is only possible through the cooperationof mankind and as a result of history—and treats them as objects, which is atfirst only possible in the form of estrangement.

We shall now demonstrate in detail the one-sidedness and the limitationsof Hegel, as observed in the closing chapter of the Phenomenology. This chap-ter (“Absolute Knowledge”) contains the concentrated essence of the Phenom-enology, its relation to the dialectic, and Hegel’s consciousness of both and theirinterrelations.


For the present, let us observe that Hegel adopts the standpoint of mod-ern political economy. He sees labor as the essence, the self-confirming essence,of man; he sees only the positive and not the negative side of labor. Labor isman’s coming to be for himself within alienation or as an alienated man. The onlylabor Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract mental labor. So that which aboveall constitutes the essence of philosophy—the alienation of man who knows him-self or alienated science that thinks itself—Hegel grasps as its essence, and istherefore able to bring together the separate elements of previous philosophiesand present his philosophy as the philosophy. What other philosophers did—that they conceived separate moments of nature and of man’s life as momentsof self-consciousness, indeed, of abstract self-consciousness—this Hegel knowsby doing philosophy. Therefore his science is absolute.

Let us now proceed to our subject.

“Absolute Knowledge”: The last chapter of the Phenomenology

The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-con-sciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness, self-con-sciousness as object. (The positing of man = self-consciousness.)

It is therefore a question of surmounting the object of consciousness. Objec-tivity as such is seen as an estranged human relationship which does not cor-respond to human nature, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of theobjective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement as somethingalien, therefore means transcending not only estrangement but also objectivity.That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being.

Hegel describes the process of surmounting the object of consciousness in thefollowing way:

The object does not only show itself as returning into the self, (according toHegel that is a one-sided conception of the movement, a conception which graspsonly one side). Man is equated with self. But the self is only abstractly conceivedman, man produced by abstraction. Man is self [selbstisch]. His eyes, his ears,etc., have the quality of self; each one of his essential powers has this quality ofself. But therefore it is quite wrong to say that self-consciousness has eyes, ears,essential powers. Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of thehuman eye, etc.; human nature is not a quality of self-consciousness.

The self abstracted and fixed for itself is man as abstract egoist, egoismraised to its pure abstraction in thought. (We shall come back to this later.)

For Hegel human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. All estrange-ment of human nature is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness.Hegel regards the estrangement of self-consciousness not as the expression,


reflected in knowledge and in thought, of the real estrangement of humannature. On the contrary, actual estrangement, estrangement which appears real,is in its innermost hidden nature—which philosophy first brings to light—noth-ing more than the appearance of the estrangement of real human nature, of self-consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called phenom-enology. All reappropriation of estranged objective being therefore appears asan incorporation into self-consciousness; the man who takes hold of his beingis only the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective being. The returnof the object into the self is therefore the reappropriation of the object.

Expressed comprehensively, the surmounting of the object of consciousnessmeans:

(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as somethingdisappearing.

(2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which establishes thing-ness [Dingheit].

(3) That this alienation has not only a negative but also a positive signifi-cance.

(4) That this significance is not only for us or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself.

(5) For self-consciousness the negative of the object, its own supersessionof itself, has a positive significance—or self-consciousness knows the nullity ofthe object—in that self-consciousness alienates itself, for in this alienation itestablishes itself as object or establishes the object as itself, for the sake of theindivisible unity of being-for-itself.

(6) On the other hand, this other moment is also present in the process,namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken back into itself thisalienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home in its other-being as such.

(7) This is the movement of consciousness, and consciousness is thereforethe totality of its moments.

(8) Similarly, consciousness must have related itself to the object in termsof the totality of its determinations, and have grasped it in terms of each ofthem. This totality of determinations makes the object intrinsically [an sich] aspiritual being, and it becomes that in reality for consciousness through theapprehending of each one of these determinations as determinations of self orthrough what we earlier called the spiritual attitude towards them.

ad (1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as somethingdisappearing is the above-mentioned return of the object into the self.

ad (2) The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thingness. Because manis equivalent to self-consciousness, his alienated objective being or thingness(that which is an object for him, and the only true object for him is that which


is an essential object, i.e. his objective essence; since it is not real man, and there-fore not nature, for man is human nature, who becomes as such the subject,but only the abstraction of man, self-consciousness, thingness can only bealienated self-consciousness) is the equivalent of alienated self-consciousness, andthingness is established by this alienation. It is entirely to be expected that aliving, natural being equipped and endowed with objective, i.e. material essen-tial powers, should have real natural objects for the objects of its being, andthat its self-alienation should take the form of the establishment of a real,objective world, but as something external to it, a world which does not belongto its being and which overpowers it. There is nothing incomprehensible ormysterious about that. It would only be mysterious if the contrary were true.But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness, through its alienation, can onlyestablish thingness, i.e. an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a realthing. It is also clear that thingness is therefore in no way something independentor substantial vis-à-vis self-consciousness; it is a mere creature, a postulate ofself-consciousness. And what is postulated, instead of confirming itself, is onlya confirmation of the act of postulating; an act which, for a single moment,concentrates its energy as product and apparently confers upon that product—but only for a moment—the role of an independent, real being.

When real, corporeal man, his feet firmly planted on the solid earth andbreathing all the powers of nature, establishes his real, objective essential pow-ers as alien objects by externalization [Entäusserung]. It is not the establishing[Setzen] which is subject; it is the subjectivity of objective essential powerswhose action must therefore be an objective one. An objective being acts objec-tively, and it would not act objectively if objectivity were not an inherent partof its essential nature. It creates and establishes only objects because it is estab-lished by objects, because it is fundamentally nature. In the act of establish-ing it therefore does not descend from its “pure activity” to the creation ofobjects; on the contrary, its objective product simply confirms its objective activ-ity, its activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.

Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism differs both from ide-alism and materialism and is at the same time their unifying truth. We also seethat only naturalism is capable of comprehending the process of world history.

Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living naturalbeing he is on the one hand equipped with natural powers, with vital powers,he is an active natural being; these powers exist in him as dispositions andcapacities, as drives. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous,objective being he is a suffering, conditioned, and limited being, like animalsand plants. That is to say, the objects of his drives exist outside him as objectsindependent of him; but these objects are objects of his need, essential objects,


indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential powers. To saythat man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being with natural pow-ers means that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being and of hisvital expression, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects.To be objective, natural, and sensuous and to have object, nature, and senseoutside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature, and sense for a third personis one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore requires a natureand an object outside itself in order to satisfy and still itself. Hunger is theacknowledged need of my body for an object which exists outside itself andwhich is indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essentialnature. The sun is an object for the plant, an indispensable object which con-firms its life, just as the plant is an object for the sun, an expression of its life-awakening power and its objective essential power.

A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural beingand plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object out-side itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for athird being has no being for its object, i.e. it has no objective relationships andits existence is not objective.

A non-objective being is a non-being.Imagine a being which is neither an object itself nor has an object. In the

first place, such a being would be the only being; no other being would existoutside it, it would exist in a condition of solitude. For as soon as there areobjects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another, a reality other thanthe object outside me. For this third object I am therefore a reality other thanit, i.e. its object. A being which is not the object of another being thereforepresupposes that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, thisobject has me for its object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sen-suous, merely thought, i.e. merely conceived being, a being of abstraction. Tobe sensuous, i.e. to be real, is to be an object of sense, a sensuous object, andthus to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sense percep-tion. To be sensuous is to suffer (to be subjected to the actions of another).

Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, andbecause he feels his suffering [Leiden], he is a passionate [leidenschaftliches]being. Passion is man’s essential power vigorously striving to attain its object.

But man is not only a natural being; he is a human natural being; i.e. heis a being for himself and hence a species-being, as which he must confirm andrealize himself both in his being and in his knowing. Consequently, humanobjects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, nor ishuman sense, in its immediate and objective existence, human sensibility andhuman objectivity. Neither objective nor subjective nature is immediately pres-


ent in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural mustcome into being, so man also has his process of origin in history. But for himhistory is a conscious process, and hence one which consciously supersedesitself. History is the true natural history of man. (We shall return to this later.)

Thirdly, since this establishing of thingness is itself only an appearance, anact which contradicts the nature of pure activity, it must be superseded onceagain and thingness must be denied.

ad 3, 4, 5, 6.(3) This alienation of consciousness has not only a negative but also a pos-

itive significance, and (4) it has this positive significance not only for us or initself, but for consciousness itself.

(5) For self-consciousness the negative of the object or its own supersessionof itself has a positive significance—or self-consciousness knows the nullity ofthe object—in that self-consciousness alienates itself, for in this alienation itknows itself as object or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-itself,the object as itself. (6) On the other hand the other moment is also present inthe process, namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken backinto itself this alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home in its other-being as such.

To recapitulate. The appropriation of estranged objective being or thesupersession of objectivity in the form of estrangement—which must proceedfrom indifferent otherness to real, hostile estrangement—principally means forHegel the supersession of objectivity, since it is not the particular character ofthe object but its objective character which constitutes the offence and theestrangement as far as self-consciousness is concerned. The object is thereforenegative, self-superseding, a nullity. This nullity of the object has not only anegative but also a positive significance for consciousness, for it is precisely theself-confirmation of its non-objectivity and abstraction. For consciousness itselfthe nullity of the object therefore has a positive significance because it knowsthis nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that thisnullity exists only as a result of its own self-alienation . . .

The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, isknowing. Knowing is its only act. Hence something comes to exist for con-sciousness in so far as it knows that something. Knowing is its only objective rela-tionship. It knows the nullity of the object, i.e. that the object is not distinctfrom it, the non-existence of the object for it, in that it knows the object as itsown self-alienation; that is, it knows itself—i.e. it knows knowing, consideredas an object—in that the object is only the appearance of an object, an illusion,which in essence is nothing more than knowing itself which has confronteditself with itself and hence with a nullity, a something which has no objectivity


outside knowing. Knowing knows that when it relates itself to an object it isonly outside itself, alienates itself; that it only appears to itself as an object, orrather, that what appears to it as an object is only itself.

On the other hand, says Hegel, this other moment is also present in theprocess, namely, that self-consciousness has superseded and taken back intoitself this alienation and objectivity, and is therefore at home in its other-beingas such.

This discussion is a compendium of all the illusions of speculation.Firstly, consciousness—self-consciousness—is at home in its other-being as

such. It is therefore, if we here abstract from Hegel’s abstraction and talk insteadof self-consciousness, of the self-consciousness of man, at home in its other-beingas such. This implies, for one thing, that consciousness—knowing as know-ing, thinking as thinking—claims to be the direct opposite of itself, claims tobe the sensuous world, reality, life—thought overreaching itself in thought(Feuerbach). This aspect is present in so far as consciousness as mere con-sciousness is offended not by estranged objectivity but by objectivity as such.

Secondly it implies that self-conscious man, in so far as he has acknowl-edged and superseded the spiritual world, or the general spiritual existence ofhis world, as self-alienation, goes on to reaffirm it in this alienated form andpresents it as his true existence, restores it and claims to be at home in his other-being as such. Thus, for example, having superseded religion and recognizedit as a product of self-alienation, he still finds himself confirmed in religion asreligion. Here is the root of Hegel’s false positivism or of his merely apparentcriticism: it is what Feuerbach calls the positing, negating, and re-establish-ing of religion or theology, but it needs to be conceived in a more general way.So reason is at home in unreason as unreason. Man, who has realized that inlaw, politics, etc., he leads an alienated life, leads his true human life in thisalienated life as such. Self-affirmation, self-confirmation in contradiction withitself and with the knowledge and the nature of the object is therefore trueknowledge and true life.

Therefore there can no longer be any question about a compromise onHegel’s part with religion, the state, etc., since this untruth is the untruth ofhis principle.

If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I knowin it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated self-conscious-ness confirmed in it. Thus I know that the self-consciousness which belongsto the essence of my own self is confirmed not in religion but in the destruc-tion and supersession of religion.

In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmationof true being through the negation of apparent being. It is the confirmation of


apparent being or self-estranged being in its negation, or the negation of thisapparent being as an objective being residing outside man and independentof him and its transformation into the subject.

The act of superseding therefore plays a special role in which negation andpreservation (affirmation) are brought together.

Thus, for example, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, private right supersededequals morality, morality superseded equals family, family superseded equalscivil society, civil society superseded equals state and state superseded equalsworld history. In reality private right, morality, family, civil society, state, etc.,continue to exist, but have become moments and modes of human existencewhich are meaningless in isolation but which mutually dissolve and engenderone another. They are moments of movement.

In their real existence this character of mobility is hidden. It first appears,is first revealed, in thought and in philosophy. Hence my true religious exis-tence is my existence in the philosophy of religion, my true political existenceis my existence in the philosophy of right, my true natural existence is my exis-tence in the philosophy of nature, my true artistic existence is my existence inthe philosophy of art and my true human existence is my existence in philosophy.Similarly, the true existence of religion, state, nature, and art is the philosophyof religion, nature, the state, and art. But if the philosophy of religion, etc., isfor me the true existence of religion, then I am truly religious only as a philoso-pher of religion, and I therefore deny real religiosity and the really religious man.But at the same time I confirm them, partly in my own existence or in the alienexistence which I oppose to them—for this is merely their philosophical expres-sion—and partly in their particular and original form, for I regard them asmerely apparent other-being, as allegories, forms of their own true existenceconcealed under sensuous mantles, i.e. forms of my philosophical existence.

Similarly, quality superseded equals quantity, quantity superseded equalsmeasure, measure superseded equals essence, essence superseded equals appear-ance, appearance superseded equals reality, reality superseded equals the con-cept, the concept superseded equals objectivity, objectivity superseded equalsthe absolute idea, the absolute idea superseded equals nature, nature supersededequals subjective spirit, subjective spirit superseded equals ethical objectivespirit, ethical spirit superseded equals art, art superseded equals religion, reli-gion superseded equals absolute knowledge.

On the one hand this act of superseding is the act of superseding an entityof thought; thus, private property as thought is superseded in the thought ofmorality. And because thought imagines itself to be the direct opposite ofitself, i.e. sensuous reality, and therefore regards its own activity as sensuous, realactivity, this supersession in thought, which leaves its object in existence in


reality, thinks it has actually overcome it. On the other hand, since the objecthas now become a moment of thought for the thought which is doing thesuperseding, it is regarded in its real existence as a confirmation of thought,of self-consciousness, of abstraction.

From one aspect the existence which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is there-fore not real religion, state, nature, but religion already in the form of an objectof knowledge, i.e. dogmatics; hence also jurisprudence, political science and natu-ral science. From this aspect he therefore stands in opposition both to the actualbeing and to the immediate non-philosophical science or non-philosophical con-cepts of this being. He therefore contradicts their current conceptions.

From the other aspect the man who is religious, etc., can find his final con-firmation in Hegel.

We should now examine the positive moments of the Hegelian dialectic,within the determining limits of estrangement.

(a) The act of superseding as an objective movement which re-absorbs alien-ation into itself. This is the insight, expressed within estrangement, into theappropriation of objective being through the supersession of its alienation; itis the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appro-priation of his objective being through the destruction of the estranged char-acter of the objective world, through the supersession of its estranged modeof existence, just as atheism as the supersession of God is the emergence oftheoretical humanism, and communism as the supersession of private prop-erty the vindication of real human life as man’s property, the emergence of prac-tical humanism. Atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the super-session of religion; communism is humanism mediated with itself through thesupersession of private property. Only when we have superseded this media-tion—which is, however, a necessary precondition—will positive humanism,positively originating in itself, come into being.

But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of theobjective world created by man or of his essential powers projected into objec-tivity, no impoverished regression to unnatural, primitive simplicity. They arerather the first real emergence, the realization become real for man, of hisessence as something real.

Therefore, in grasping the positive significance of the negation which hasreference to itself, even if once again in estranged form, Hegel grasps man’sself-estrangement, alienation of being, loss of objectivity, and loss of reality asself-discovery, expression of being, objectification, and realization. In short,he sees labor—within abstraction—as man’s act of self-creation and man’s rela-tion to himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as an alienbeing as the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life.


(b) But in Hegel, apart from or rather as a consequence of the inversionwe have already described, this act appears, firstly, to be merely formal becauseit is abstract and because human nature itself is seen only as abstract thinkingbeing, as self-consciousness.

And secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the super-session of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation. In other words,Hegel sees this movement of self-creation and self-objectification in the form ofself-alienation and self-estrangement as the absolute and hence the final expres-sion of human life which has itself as its aim, is at rest in itself, and has attainedits own essential nature.

This movement in its abstract form as dialectic is therefore regarded as trulyhuman life. And since it is still an abstraction, an estrangement of human life,it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man. It is man’sabstract, pure, absolute being (as distinct from himself), which itself passesthrough this process.

Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject; but the subject comesinto being only as the result; this result, the subject knowing itself as absoluteself-consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates, symbolsof this hidden, unreal man and this unreal nature. Subject and predicate there-fore stand in a relation of absolute inversion to one another; a mystical sub-ject–object or subjectivity encroaching upon the object, the absolute subject as aprocess, as a subject which alienates itself and returns to itself from alienation,while at the same time reabsorbing this alienation, and the subject as thisprocess; pure, ceaseless revolving within itself.

First, the formal and abstract conception of man’s act of self-creation or self-objectification.

Because Hegel equates man with self-consciousness, the estranged object,the estranged essential reality of man is nothing but consciousness, nothingbut the thought of estrangement, its abstract and hence hollow and unrealexpression, negation. The supersession of alienation is therefore likewise noth-ing but an abstract, hollow supersession of that hollow abstraction, the nega-tion of the negation. The inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity,an abstraction which is then given permanent form as such and conceived asindependent activity, as activity itself. Since this so-called negativity is noth-ing more than the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content canonly be a formal content, created by abstraction from all content. Consequentlythere are general, abstract forms of abstraction which fit every content and aretherefore indifferent to all content; forms of thought and logical categories torn


away from real mind and real nature. (We shall expound the logical content ofabsolute negativity later.)

Hegel’s positive achievement in his speculative logic is to present determi-nate concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence of natureand mind, as a necessary result of the universal estrangement of human exis-tence, and thus also of human thought, and to comprehend them as momentsin the process of abstraction. For example, being superseded is essence, essencesuperseded is the concept, the concept superseded is . . . the absolute idea. Butwhat is the absolute idea? It is compelled to supersede its own self again, if itdoes not wish to go through the whole act of abstraction once more from thebeginning and to reconcile itself to being a totality of abstractions or a self-com-prehending abstraction. But the abstraction which comprehends itself asabstraction knows itself to be nothing; it must relinquish itself, the abstraction,and so arrives at something which is its exact opposite, nature. Hence the wholeof the Logic is proof of the fact that abstract thought is nothing for itself, thatthe absolute idea is nothing for itself, and that only nature is something.

The absolute idea, the abstract idea which “considered from the aspect ofits unity with itself is intuition [Anschauen],” and which “in its own absolutetruth resolves to let the moment of its particularity or of initial determinationand other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflection, issue freely from itself asnature,” this whole idea, which conducts itself in such a strange and baroquefashion, and which has caused the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is purelyand simply abstraction, i.e. the abstract thinker; abstraction which, taught byexperience and enlightened as to its own truth, resolves under various con-ditions—themselves false and still abstract—to relinquish itself and to estab-lish its other-being, the particular, the determinate, in place of its self-perva-sion [Beisichsein], non-being, universality and indeterminateness; to let nature,which it concealed within itself as a mere abstraction, as a thing of thought,issue freely from itself, i.e. to abandon abstraction and to take a look at nature,which exists free from abstraction. The abstract idea, which directly becomesintuition, is quite simply nothing more than abstract thought which relin-quishes itself and decides to engage in intuiting. This entire transition from logicto philosophy of nature is nothing more than the transition—so difficult forthe abstract thinker to effect, and hence described by him in such a bizarremanner—from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives thephilosopher from abstract thinking to intuition is boredom, the longing for acontent.

The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from hisessence, i.e. from his natural and human essence. His thoughts are thereforefixed phantoms existing outside nature and man. In his Logic Hegel has locked


up all these phantoms, conceiving each of them firstly as negation, i.e. asalienation of human thought, and secondly as negation of the negation, i.e. assupersession of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But sincethis negation of the negation is itself still trapped in estrangement, what thisamounts to is in part the restoration of these fixed phantoms in their estrange-ment and in part a failure to move beyond the final stage, the stage of self-ref-erence in alienation, which is the true existence of these phantoms.1 In so faras this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences an infinite boredom withitself, we find in Hegel an abandonment of abstract thought which movessolely within thought, which has no eyes, teeth, ears, anything, and a resolveto recognize nature as being and to go over to intuition.

But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself, and fixed in its separation fromman, is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker whodecides on intuition, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed inthe thinker in a shape which even to him was shrouded and mysterious, asan absolute idea, a thing of thought, so what he allowed to come forth fromhimself was simply this abstract nature, nature as a thing of thought—but withthe significance now of being the other-being of thought, real, intuited natureas distinct from abstract thought. Or, to put it in human terms, the abstractthinker discovers from intuiting nature that the entities which he imagined hewas creating out of nothing, out of pure abstraction, in a divine dialectic, asthe pure products of the labor of thought living and moving within itself andnever looking out into reality, are nothing more than abstractions from naturalforms. The whole of nature only repeats to him in a sensuous, external formthe abstractions of logic. He analyses nature and these abstractions again. Hisintuiting of nature is therefore only the act of confirmation of his abstractionfrom the intuition of nature, a conscious re-enactment of the process by whichhe produced his abstraction. Thus, for example, Time is equated with Nega-tivity referred to itself. In the natural form, superseded Movement as Mattercorresponds to superseded Becoming as Being. Light is the natural form ofReflection-in-itself. Body as Moon and Comet is the natural form of the antithe-sis which, according to the Logic, is the positive grounded upon itself and the neg-ative grounded upon itself. The Earth is the natural form of the logical ground,as the negative unity of the antithesis, etc.

Nature as nature, i.e. in so far as it is sensuously distinct from the secretsense hidden within it, nature separated and distinct from these abstractionsis nothing, a nothing proving itself to be nothing, it is devoid of sense, or only hasthe sense of an externality to be superseded.

“In the finite-teleological view is to be found the correct premise that naturedoes not contain the absolute end within itself.”


Its end is the confirmation of abstraction.“Nature has revealed itself as the idea in the form of other-being. Since the

idea in this form is the negative of itself or external to itself, nature is not onlyexternal relative to this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which itexists as nature.”

Externality here should not be understood as self-externalizing sensuousnessaccessible to light and to sensuous man. It is to be taken in the sense of alien-ation, a flaw, a weakness, something which ought not to be. For that which istrue is still the idea. Nature is only the form of its other-being. And since abstractthought is the essence, that which is external to it is in essence somethingmerely external. The abstract thinker recognizes at the same time that sensu-ousness, externality in contrast to thought which moves and lives within itself,is the essence of nature. But at the same time he expresses this antithesis insuch a way that this externality of nature, its antithesis to thought, is its defectand that in so far as it is distinct from abstraction it is a defective being. A beingwhich is defective not only for me, not only in my eyes, but in itself, has some-thing outside itself which it lacks. That is to say, its essence is something otherthan itself. For the abstract thinker nature must therefore supersede itself,since it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being.

“For us, mind has nature as its premise, since it is nature’s truth and there-fore its absolute primus. In this truth nature has disappeared, and mind hasyielded as the idea which has attained being-for-itself, whose object as well assubject is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in naturethe concept has its perfect external objectivity, in this its alienation has beensuperseded and the concept has become identical with itself. It is this iden-tity only in that it is a return from nature.”

“Revelation, as the abstract idea, is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, nature; as the revelation of the mind which is free it is the establishingof nature as its own world; an establishing which, as reflection, is at the sametime a presupposing of the world as independently existing nature. Revelationin its concept is the creation of nature as the mind’s being, in which it pro-cures the affirmation and truth of its freedom.” “The absolute is mind: this isthe highest definition of the absolute.”

NOTE

1. K. M.: That is, Hegel substitutes the act of abstraction revolving within itself for thesefixed abstractions; in so doing he has the merit, first of all, of having revealed the sourceof all these inappropriate concepts which originally belonged to separate philosophers, of


having combined them and of having created as the object of criticism the exhaustive rangeof abstraction rather than one particular abstraction. We shall later see why Hegel sepa-rates thought from the subject; but it is already clear that if man is not human, then theexpression of his essential nature cannot be human, and therefore that thought itself couldnot be conceived as an expression of man’s being, of man as a human and natural subject,with eyes, ears, etc., living in society, in the world and in nature.

“THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY—IDEOLOGY IN GENERAL” (1844–46)

Marx continues to distinguish his own position from Hegel and Feuerbach.He develops a major category of his mature reflection, the idea of produc-tion—that humans produce our means of subsistence (i.e., use tools totransform the material environment from which we derive our life). As wetransform these means of production we transform the social relationsestablished by that production and thus transform our consciousness, ourreflexive self-awareness. We find here his famous phrase “consciousnessdoes not determine life, but life determines consciousness.”

Right up to its most recent efforts, German criticism never left therealm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic

premises, all of its inquiries were based on one philosophical system, that ofHegel. There was mystification not only in the answers but also even in thequestions themselves. This dependence on Hegel is the reason why none ofthese modern critics even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegeliansystem, though each of them claimed to have gone beyond Hegel. Theirpolemics against Hegel and against one another are rather limited. Each criticpicks one aspect of the Hegelian system and applies it to the entire system aswell as to the aspects chosen by other critics. In the beginning they took uppure and unfalsified Hegelian categories such as “Substance” or “Self-con-sciousness.” Later they desecrated such categories by giving them more mun-dane names such as “Species,” “the Unique,” “Man,” etc.

All German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined tocriticism of religious conceptions. The critics proceeded from real religion andactual theology. As they went on, they determined in various ways what con-stitutes religious consciousness and religious conceptions. Their progress con-sisted of their subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridi-cal, moral, and other concepts under the class of religious or theologicalconcepts. Similarly, they declared political, juridical, and moral consciousness

“The German Ideology—Ideology in General ” (1844–46) 93

to be religious or theological consciousness, and the political, juridical, andmoral man, “Man” in the last resort, to be religious. They presupposed the gov-ernance of religion. Gradually every dominant relationship was held to bereligious and made into a cult, such as the cult of law, the cult of state, etc.Eventually there was nothing but dogmas and belief in dogmas. The worldwas more and more sanctified until our honorable Saint Max [Stirner] was ableto sanctify it en bloc and dismiss it once for all.

The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything once they reduced it toa Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticized everything by imput-ing religious conceptions to it or declaring everything to be theological. TheYoung Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in believing in thegovernance of religion, concepts, a universal principle in the existing world.But one party attacks this governance as usurpation while the other partypraises it as legitimate.

Since the Young Hegelians regard concepts, thoughts, ideas, and all prod-ucts of consciousness, to which they give independent existence, as the realfetters of man—while the Old Hegelians pronounced them the true bondsof human society—it is obvious that the Young Hegelians have to fight onlyagainst the illusions of consciousness. In the Young Hegelians’ fantasies therelationships of men, all their actions, their chains, and their limitations areproducts of their consciousness. Consequently they give men the moral pos-tulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical, or ego-istic consciousness to remove their limitations. This amounts to a demandto interpret what exists in a different way, that is, to recognize it by meansof a different interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists are thestaunchest conservatives, despite their allegedly “world-shaking” statements.The most recent among them have found the correct expression for theirdoings in saying they are fighting only against “phrases.” They forget, how-ever, that they fight them only with phrases of their own. In no way are theyattacking the actual existing world; they merely attack the phrases of thisworld. The only results this philosophic criticism could achieve were someelucidations on Christianity, one-sided as they are, from the point of viewof religious history. All their other assertions are only further embellish-ments of their basic claim that these unimportant elucidations are discov-eries of world-historical significance.

Not one of these philosophers ever thought to look into the connectionbetween German philosophy and German reality, between their criticism andtheir own material environment.


1. IDEOLOGY IN GENERAL, ESPECIALLY GERMAN PHILOSOPHY*

((We know only one science, the science of history. History can be viewed fromtwo sides: it can be divided into the history of nature and that of man. Thetwo sides, however, are not to be seen as independent entities. As long as manhas existed, nature and man have affected each other. The history of nature,so-called natural history, does not concern us here at all. But we will have todiscuss the history of man, since almost all ideology amounts to either a dis-torted interpretation of this history or a complete abstraction from it. Ideol-ogy itself is only one of the sides of this history.))

The premises from which we start are not arbitrary; they are not dogmasbut rather actual premises from which abstraction can be made only in imag-ination. They are the real individuals, their actions, and their material condi-tions of life, those which they find existing as well as those which they pro-duce through their actions. These premises can be substantiated in a purelyempirical way.

The first premise of all human history, of course, is the existence of livinghuman individuals. ((The first historical act of these individuals, the act bywhich they distinguish themselves from animals is not the fact that they thinkbut the fact that they begin to produce their means of subsistence.)) The first factto be established, then, is the physical organization of these individuals andtheir consequent relationship to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot dis-cuss here the physical nature of man or the natural conditions in which manfinds himself—geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic, and others. ((Theserelationships affect not only the original and natural organization of men,especially as to race, but also his entire further development or non-develop-ment up to the present.)) All historiography must proceed from these naturalbases and their modification in the course of history through the actions ofmen.

Man can be distinguished from the animal by consciousness, religion, oranything else you please. He begins to distinguish himself from the animal themoment he begins to produce his means of subsistence, a step required by hisphysical organization. By producing food, man indirectly produces his mate-rial life itself.


*This heading and subsequent material within double parentheses crossed out in the man-uscript.

The way in which man produces his food depends first of all on the natureof the means of subsistence that he finds and has to reproduce. This mode ofproduction must not be viewed simply as reproduction of the physical exis-tence of individuals. Rather it is a definite form of their activity, a definite wayof expressing their life, a definite mode of life. As individuals express their life,so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with what they produce, withwhat they produce and how they produce. The nature of individuals thusdepends on the material conditions which determine their production.

This production begins with population growth which in turn presupposesinteraction [Verkehr] among individuals. The form of such interaction is againdetermined by production.

The relations of various nations with one another depend upon the extent towhich each of them has developed its productive forces, the division of labor,and domestic commerce. This proposition is generally accepted. But not onlythe relation of one nation to others, but also the entire internal structure ofthe nation itself depends on the stage of development achieved by its pro-duction and its domestic and international commerce. How far the produc-tive forces of a nation are developed is shown most evidently by the degree towhich the division of labor has been developed. Each new productive force,insofar as it is not only a quantitative extension of productive forces alreadyknown (e.g. cultivation of land) will bring about a further development of thedivision of labor.

The division of labor in a nation leads first of all to the separation of indus-trial-commercial labor from agricultural labor and consequently to the sepa-ration of town and country and to a clash of their interests. Its further devel-opment leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labor. At the sametime, within these various branches, there develop through the division of laborfurther various divisions among the individuals co-operating in specific kindsof labor. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by themethods employed in agricultural, industrial, and commercial labor (patriar-chalism, slavery, estates, classes). The same conditions can be observed in therelations of various nations if commerce has been further developed.

The different stages of development in the division of labor are just so manydifferent forms of ownership; that is, the stage in the division of labor alsodetermines the relations of individuals to one another so far as the material,instrument, and product of labor are concerned.

The first form of ownership is tribal ownership. It corresponds to theundeveloped stage of production where people live by hunting and fishing,


by breeding animals or, in the highest stage, by agriculture. Great areas ofuncultivated land are required in the latter case. The division of labor at thisstage is still very undeveloped and confined to extending the natural divisionof labor in the family. The social structure thus is limited to an extension ofthe family: patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe,finally the slaves. The slavery latent in the family develops only gradually withthe increase in population, the increase of wants, and the extension of exter-nal relations in war as well as in barter.

The second form is the ancient communal and state ownership which pro-ceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement orby conquest; this form is still accompanied by slavery. Alongside communalownership there already develops movable, and later even immovable, privateproperty, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership. Thecitizens hold power over their laboring slaves only in community and aretherefore bound to the form of communal ownership. The communal privateproperty of the active citizens compels them to remain in this natural form ofassociation over against their slaves. Hence the whole social structure basedon communal ownership and with it the power of the people decline asimmovable private property develops. The division of labor is developed to alarger extent. We already find antagonism between town and country andlater antagonism between states representing urban interests and those repre-senting rural interests. Within the cities themselves we find the antagonismbetween industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizensand slaves is then fully developed.

With the development of private property we encounter for the first timethose conditions which we shall find again with modern private property, onlyon a larger scale. On the one hand, there is the concentration of private prop-erty which began very early in Rome (as proved by the Licinian agrarian law)and proceeded very rapidly from the time of the civil wars and particularlyunder the emperors. On the other hand, there is linked to this the transfor-mation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat that never achievedan independent development because of its intermediate position betweenpropertied citizens and slaves.

The third form is feudal or estate ownership. Antiquity started out fromthe town and the small territory around it; the Middle Ages started out fromthe country. This different starting-point was caused by the sparse populationat that time, scattered over a large area and receiving no large populationincrease from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, the feudaldevelopment began in a much larger area, prepared by the Roman conquests


and the spreading of agriculture initially connected with these conquests. Thelast centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbar-ians destroyed many productive forces. Agriculture had declined, trade hadcome to a standstill or had been interrupted by force, and the rural and urbanpopulation had decreased. These conditions and the mode of organization ofthe conquest determined by them developed feudal property under the influ-ence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal own-ership, it is based again on a community. While the slaves stood in opposi-tion to the ancient community, here the serfs as the direct producing class standin opposition. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also emergesantagonism to the towns. The hierarchical system of land ownership and thearmed bodies of retainers gave the nobility power over the serfs. Like theancient communal ownership this feudal organization was an associationdirected against a subjected producing class. But the form of association andthe relation to the direct producers were different because of the different con-ditions of production.

This feudal organization of land ownership had its counterpart in thetowns in the form of corporate property, the feudal organization of the trades.Property consisted mainly in the labor of each individual. The necessity forassociation against the organized robber nobility, the need for communalmarkets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant,the growing competition of escaped serfs pouring into the rising cities, andthe feudal structure of the whole country gave rise to guilds. The graduallyaccumulated capital of individual craftsmen and their stable number in com-parison to the growing population produced the relationship of journeymanand apprentice. In the towns, this led to a hierarchy similar to that in thecountry.

The main form of property during the feudal times consisted, on the onehand, of landed property with serf labor and, on the other hand, individuallabor with small capital controlling the labor of journeymen. The organiza-tion of both was determined by the limited conditions of production: small-scale, primitive cultivation of land and industry based on crafts. There was lit-tle division of labor when feudalism was at its peak. Every district carried initself the antagonism of town and country. Though division into estates wasstrongly marked, there was no division of importance apart from the differ-entiation of princes, nobility, clergy, and peasants in the country, and masters,journeymen, apprentices, and soon the mob of day laborers in the cities. Thestrip-system hindered such a division in agriculture; cottage industry of thepeasants themselves emerged; and in industry there was no division of laborat all within particular trades, and very little among them. The separation of


industry and commerce occurred in older towns, and in newer towns it devel-oped later when they entered into mutual relations.

The merger of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity forthe landed nobility as well as for the cities. The organization of the ruling class,the nobility, had a monarch at its head in all instances.

The fact is, then, that definite individuals who are productively active in aspecific way enter into these definite social and political relations. In eachparticular instance, empirical observation must show empirically, withoutany mystification or speculation, the connection of the social and politicalstructure with production. The social structure and the state continuallyevolve out of the life-process of definite individuals, but individuals not asthey may appear in their own or other people’s imagination but rather as theyreally are, that is, as they work, produce materially, and act under definitematerial limitations, presuppositions, and conditions independent of theirwill.

((The ideas which these individuals form are ideas either about their rela-tion to nature, their mutual relations, or their own nature. It is evident that inall these cases these ideas are the conscious expression—real or illusory—oftheir actual relationships and activities, of their production and commerce, andof their social and political behavior. The opposite assumption is possible onlyif, in addition to the spirit of the actual and materially evolved individuals, aseparate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the actual rela-tions of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn realityupside down, this in turn is a result of their limited mode of activity and theirlimited social relations arising from it.))

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is directly inter-woven with the material activity and the material relationships of men; it isthe language of actual life. Conceiving, thinking, and the intellectual rela-tionships of men appear here as the direct result of their material behavior.The same applies to intellectual production as manifested in a people’s lan-guage of politics, law, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. Men are the pro-ducers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., but these are real, active men, as theyare conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and ofthe relationships corresponding to these up to their highest forms. Con-sciousness can never be anything else except conscious existence, and theexistence of men is their actual life-process. If men and their circumstancesappear upside down in all ideology as in a camera obscura, this phenomenonis caused by their historical life-process, just as the inversion of objects on theretina is caused by their immediate physical life.


In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heavento earth, here one ascends from earth to heaven. In other words, to arriveat man in the flesh, one does not set out from what men say, imagine, orconceive, nor from man as he is described, thought about, imagined, orconceived. Rather one sets out from real, active men and their actual life-process and demonstrates the development of ideological reflexes and echoesof that process. The phantoms formed in the human brain, too, are neces-sary sublimations of man’s material life-process which is empirically verifi-able and connected with material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics,and all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousnessno longer seem to be independent. They have no history or development.Rather, men who develop their material production and their material rela-tionships alter their thinking and the products of their thinking along withtheir real existence. Consciousness does not determine life, but life deter-mines consciousness. In the first view the starting point is consciousnesstaken as a living individual; in the second it is the real living individualsthemselves as they exist in real life, and consciousness is considered only astheir consciousness.

This view is not devoid of premises. It proceeds from real premises anddoes not abandon them for a moment. These premises are men, not in anyfantastic isolation and fixation, but in their real, empirically perceptible processof development under certain conditions. When this active life-process is pre-sented, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiri-cists who are themselves still abstract, or an imagined activity of imagined sub-jects, as with the idealists.

Where speculation ends, namely in actual life, there real, positive sciencebegins as the representation of the practical activity and practical process ofthe development of men. Phrases about consciousness cease and real knowl-edge takes their place. With the description of reality, independent philoso-phy loses its medium of existence. At best, a summary of the most generalresults, abstractions derived from observation of the historical developmentof men, can take its place. Apart from actual history, these abstractions havein themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrange-ment of historical material and to indicate the sequence of its particular strata.By no means do they give us a recipe or schema, as philosophy does, for trim-ming the epochs of history. On the contrary, the difficulties begin only whenwe start the observation and arrangement of the material, the real description,whether of a past epoch or of the present.


“THE HOLY FAMILY, OR CRITIQUE OF CRITICAL CRITICISM” (1844)

AGAINST BRUNO BAUER AND CO. (EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER VI)

Exiled to Paris in 1843, Marx met Engels and discovered both shared acommon passion for Feuerbach, but it was a passion that would dwindleas politics for both men became the true arena of emancipatory effort.This marks the beginning of Marx’s loss of interest in speculative philoso-phy and theology (as in Bruno Bauer), and the turn of his critical atten-tion to the British political economists (those practical philosophers ofwealth). The idea of class and of class struggle is taking shape—not con-sciousness conscious of itself (Hegel) but working class consciousnessengaged in political struggle.

CRITICAL BATTLE AGAINST FRENCH MATERIALISM

“Spinozism dominated the eighteenth century in its later French varietywhich made matter into substance, as well as in deism, which conferred onmatter a more spiritual name. . . . Spinoza’s French school and the supporters ofdeism were but two sects disputing over the true meaning of his system. . . .The simple fate of this Enlightenment was its sinking into romanticism afterbeing obliged to surrender to the reaction which began after the French move-ment.”

That is what Criticism says.To the critical history of French materialism we shall oppose a brief out-

line of its profane, voluminous history. We shall admit with due respect theabyss between history as it really happened and history as it happened accord-ing to the decree of “Absolute Criticism,” the creator equally of the old and ofthe new. And finally, obeying the prescriptions of Criticism, we shall make the“Why?”, “Whence?” and “Whither?” of Critical history the “objects of a per-severing study.”

“Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense,” the French Enlightenment ofthe eighteenth century, in particular French materialism, was not only a strug-gle against the existing political institutions and the existing religion and the-ology; it was just as much an open struggle against metaphysics of the seven-teenth century, and against all metaphysics, in particular that of Descartes,Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Philosophy was opposed to metaphysics asFeuerbach, in his first decisive attack on Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to

“The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism” (1844) 101

drunken speculation. Seventeenth-century metaphysics, beaten off the field bythe French Enlightenment, to be precise, by French materialism of the eigh-teenth century, was given a victorious and solid restoration in German philoso-phy, particularly, in speculative German philosophy of the nineteenth century.After Hegel linked it in so masterly a fashion with all subsequent metaphysicsand with German idealism and founded a metaphysical universal kingdom,the attack on speculative metaphysics and metaphysics in general again corre-sponded, as in the eighteenth century, to the attack on theology. It will bedefeated forever by materialism which has now been perfected by the workof speculation itself and coincides with humanism. As Feuerbach representedmaterialism in the theoretical domain, French and English socialism and com-munism in the practical field represented materialism which coincided withhumanism.

“Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense,” there are two trends in Frenchmaterialism; one traces its origin to Descartes, the other to Locke. The latter ismainly a French development and leads direct to socialism. The former, mechan-ical materialism, merges with what is properly French natural science. The twotrends cross in the course of development. We have no need here to go deepinto French materialism, which comes direct from Descartes, any more thaninto the French Newton school or the development of French natural sciencein general.

We shall therefore just note the following:Descartes in his physics endowed matter with self-creative power and con-

ceived mechanical motion as the act of its life. He completely separated hisphysics from his metaphysics. Within his physics matter is the only substance,the only basis of being and of knowledge.

Mechanical French materialism followed Descartes’ physics in opposition tohis metaphysics. His followers were by profession anti-metaphysicists, i.e., physi-cists.

The school begins with the physician Leroy, reaches its zenith with thephysician Cabanis, and the physician Lamettrie is its center. Descartes was stillliving when Leroy, like Lamettrie in the eighteenth century, transposed theCartesian structure of animals to the human soul and affirmed that the soul isa modus of the body and ideas are mechanical motions. Leroy even thoughtDescartes had kept his real opinion secret. Descartes protested. At the end ofthe eighteenth century Cabanis perfected Cartesian materialism in his treatise:Rapport du physique et du moral de l’homme.

Cartesian materialism still exists today in France. It had great success inmechanical natural science which, “speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense”will be least of all reproached with romanticism.


Metaphysics of the seventeenth century, represented in France by Descartes,had materialism as its antagonist from its very birth. It personally opposedDescartes in Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism. French and Eng-lish materialism was always closely related to Democritus and Epicurus. Carte-sian metaphysics had another opponent in the English materialist Hobbes.Gassendi and Hobbes were victorious over their opponent long after theirdeath when metaphysics was already officially dominant in all French schools.

Voltaire observed that the indifference of Frenchmen to the disputesbetween Jesuits and Jansenists in the eighteenth century was due less to phi-losophy than to Law’s financial speculation. And, in fact, the downfall of sev-enteenth-century metaphysics can be explained by the materialistic theory ofthe eighteenth century only as far as that theoretical movement itself isexplained by the practical nature of French life at the time. That life wasturned to the immediate present, worldly enjoyment and wordly interests, theearthly world. Its anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, and materialistic prac-tice demanded corresponding anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, and mate-rialistic theories. Metaphysics had in practice lost all credit. Here we have onlyto indicate briefly the theoretical process.

In the seventeenth century metaphysics (cf. Descartes, Leibniz, and oth-ers) still had an element of positive, profane content. It made discoveries inmathematics, physics, and other exact sciences which seemed to come withinits pale. This appearance was done away with as early as the beginning of theeighteenth century. The positive sciences broke off from it and determined theirown separate fields. The whole wealth of metaphysics was reduced to beingsof thought and heavenly things, although this was the very time when realbeings and earthly things began to be the center of all interest. Metaphysicshad gone stale. In the very year in which Malebranche and Arnauld, the lastgreat French metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, died, Helvétius andCondillac were born.

The man who deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics of all credit in thedomain of theory was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was skepticism, which he forgedout of metaphysics’ own magic formulae. He at first proceeded from Cartesianmetaphysics. As Feuerbach was driven by the fight against speculative theol-ogy to the fight against speculative philosophy precisely because he recognizedin speculation the last prop of theology, because he had to force theology toturn back from pretended science to coarse, repulsive faith, so Bayle too wasdriven by religious doubt to doubt about metaphysics which was the supportof that faith. He therefore critically investigated metaphysics from its very ori-gin. He became its historian in order to write the history of its death. Hemainly refuted Spinoza and Leibniz.


Pierre Bayle did not only prepare the reception of materialism and the phi-losophy of common sense in France by shattering metaphysics with his skep-ticism. He heralded atheistic society, which was soon to come to existence, byproving that a society consisting only of atheists is possible, that an atheist canbe a respectable man and that it is not by atheism but by superstition and idol-atry that man debases himself.

To quote the expression of a French writer, Pierre Bayle was “the last meta-physician in the seventeenth-century sense of the word and the first philosopher inthe sense of the eighteenth century.”

Besides the negative refutation of seventeenth-century theology and meta-physics, a positive, anti-metaphysical system was required. A book was neededwhich would systematize and theoretically justify the practice of life of the time.Locke’s treatise on the origin of human reason came from across the Channelas if in answer to a call. It was welcomed enthusiastically like a long-awaitedguest.

To the question: Was Locke perchance a follower of Spinoza? “Profane” his-tory may answer:

Materialism is the native son of Great Britain. Even Britain’s scholastic DunsScotus wondered: “Can matter think?”

In order to bring about that miracle he had recourse to God’s omnipotence,i.e., he forced theology itself to preach materialism. In addition he was a nom-inalist. Nominalism is a main component of English materialism and is in gen-eral the first expression of materialism.

The real founder of English materialism and all modern experimental sciencewas Bacon. For him natural science was true science and physics based on per-ception was the most excellent part of natural science. Anaxagoras with hishomoeomeria and Democritus with his atoms are often the authorities he refersto. According to his teaching the senses are infallible and are the source of allknowledge. Science is experimental and consists in applying a rational methodto the data provided by the senses. Induction, analysis, comparison, observa-tion, and experiment are the principal requisites of rational method. The firstand most important of the inherent qualities of matter is motion, not onlymechanical and mathematical movement, but still more impulse, vital life-spirit,tension, or, to use Jacob Böhme’s expression, the throes [Qual] of matter. Theprimary forms of matter are the living, individualizing forces of being inherentin it and producing the distinctions between the species.

In Bacon, its first creator, materialism contained latent and still in a naiveway the germs of all-round development. Matter smiled at man with poeticalsensuous brightness. The aphoristic doctrine itself, on the other hand, was fullof the inconsistencies of theology.


In its further development materialism became one-sided. Hobbes was theone who systematized Bacon’s materialism. Sensuousness lost its bloom andbecame the abstract sensuousness of the geometrician. Physical motion was sac-rificed to the mechanical or mathematical, geometry was proclaimed the princi-pal science. Materialism became hostile to humanity. In order to overcome theanti-human incorporeal spirit in its own field, materialism itself was obliged tomortify its flesh and become an ascetic. It appeared as a being of reason, but italso developed the implacable logic of reason.

If man’s senses are the source of all his knowledge, Hobbes argues, pro-ceeding from Bacon, then conception, thought, imagination, etc., are nothingbut phantoms of the material world more or less divested of its sensuous form.Science can only give a name to these phantoms. One name can be appliedto several phantoms. There can even be names of names. But it would be acontradiction to say, on the one hand, that all ideas have their origin in theworld of the senses and to maintain, on the other hand, that a word is morethan a word, that besides the beings represented, which are always individ-ual, there exist also general beings. An incorporeal substance is just as much acontradiction as an incorporeal body. Body, being, substance are one and the samereal idea. One cannot separate the thought from matter which thinks. Matteris the subject of all changes. The word infinite is meaningless unless it meansthe capacity of our mind to go on adding without end. Since only what is mate-rial is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God. I amsure only of my own existence. Every human passion is a mechanical motionending or beginning. The objects of impulses are what is called good. Man issubject to the same laws as nature; might and freedom are identical.

Hobbes systematized Bacon, but did not give a more precise proof of hisbasic principle that our knowledge and our ideas have their source in theworld of the senses.

Locke proved the principle of Bacon and Hobbes in his essay on the ori-gin of human reason.

Just as Hobbes did away with the theistic prejudices in Bacon’s material-ism, so Collins, Dodwall, Coward, Hartley, Priestley and others broke downthe last bounds of Locke’s sensualism. For materialists, at least, deism is nomore than a convenient and easy way of getting rid of religion.

We have already mentioned how opportune Locke’s work was for theFrench. Locke founded the philosophy of bon sens, of common sense; i.e., hesaid indirectly that no philosopher can be at variance with the healthy humansenses and reason based on them.

Locke’s immediate follower, Condillac, who also translated him into French,at once opposed Locke’s sensualism to seventeenth-century metaphysics. He


proved that the French had quite rightly rejected metaphysics as the merebungling of fancy and theological prejudice. He published a refutation of thesystems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Malebranche.

In his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines he expounded Locke’sideas and proved that not only the soul, but the senses too, not only the artof creating ideas, but also the art of sensuous perception are matters of expe-rience and habit. The whole development of man therefore depends on educa-tion and environment. It was only by eclectic philosophy that Condillac wasousted from the French schools.

The difference between French and English materialism follows from thedifference between the two nations. The French imparted to English materi-alism wit, flesh and blood, and eloquence. They gave it the temperament andgrace that it lacked. They civilized it.

In Helvétius, who also based himself on Locke, materialism became reallyFrench. Helvétius conceived it immediately in its application to social life(Helvétius, De l’homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation). Sensu-ous qualities and self-love, enjoyment and correctly understood personal inter-ests are the bases of morals. The natural equality of human intelligence, theunity of progress of reason and progress of industry, the natural goodness ofman and the omnipotence of education are the main points in his system.

In Lamettrie’s works we find a combination of Descartes’ system and Eng-lish materialism. He makes use of Descartes’ physics in detail. His “Man Machine”is a treatise after the model of Descartes’ beast-machine. The physical part ofHolbach’s Système de la nature, ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moralis also a result of the combination of French and English materialism, while themoral part is based substantially on the moral of Helvétius. Robinet (De laNature), the French materialist who had the most connection with metaphysicsand was therefore praised by Hegel, refers explicitly to Leibniz.

We need not dwell on Volney, Dupuis, Diderot, and others any more thanon the physiocrats, having already proved the dual origin of French material-ism from Descartes’ physics and English materialism and the opposition ofFrench materialism to seventeenth-century metaphysics and to the metaphysicsof Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. The Germans could not seethis opposition before they came into the same opposition with speculativemetaphysics.

As Cartesian materialism merges into natural science proper, the other branchof French materialism leads direct to socialism and communism.

There is no need of any great penetration to see from the teaching of mate-rialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, theomnipotence of experience, habit, and education, and the influence of environ-


ment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment,etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism.If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses andthe experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in itman experiences and gets used to what is really human and that he becomes awareof himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morals,man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. Ifman is unfree in the materialist sense, i.e., is free not through the negative powerto avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individu-ality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social source ofcrime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vitalmanifestation of his being. If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surround-ings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his truenature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by thepower of separate individuals but by the power of society.

This and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in theoldest French materialists. This is not the place to assess them. Fable of the Bees,or Private Vices Made Public Benefits, by Mandeville, one of the early English fol-lowers of Locke, is typical of the social tendencies of materialism. He provesthat in modern society vice is indispensable and useful. This was by no meansan apology of modern society.

Fourier proceeds immediately from the teaching of the French material-ists. The Babouvists were course, uncivilized materialists, but mature commu-nism too comes directly from French materialism. The latter returned to itsmother-country, England, in the form Helvétius gave it. Bentham based his sys-tem of correctly understood interest on Helvétius’s moral, and Owen proceededfrom Bentham’s system to found English communism. Exiled to England, theFrenchman Cabet came under the influence of communist ideas there and onhis return to France became the most popular, although the most superficial,representative of communism. Like Owen, the more scientific French com-munists, Dezamy, Gay, and others, developed the teaching of materialism asthe teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of communism. . . .

PREFACE: “A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICALECONOMY” (1859)

In this brief retrospective essay, written more than ten years later (1859),Marx makes clear why it was he gave up on speculative philosophy andturned instead to economic and political analysis.

Preface: “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859) 107

Iexamine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: cap-ital, landed property, wage-labor; the State, foreign trade, world market.

The economic conditions of existence of the three great classes into whichmodern bourgeois society in divided are analyzed under the first three head-ings; the interconnection of the other three headings is self-evident. The firstpart of the first book, dealing with Capital, comprises the following chapters:1. The commodity; 2. Money or simple circulation; 3. Capital in general. Thepresent part consists of the first two chapters. The entire material lies beforeme in the form of monographs, which were written not for publication butfor self-clarification at widely separated periods; their remolding into an inte-grated whole according to the plan I have indicated will depend upon cir-cumstances.

A general introduction, which I had drafted, is omitted, since on furtherconsideration it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still haveto be substantiated, and the reader who really wishes to follow me will haveto decide to advance from the particular to the general. A few brief remarksregarding the course of my study of political economy may, however, be appro-priate here.

Although I studied jurisprudence, I pursued it as a subject subordinatedto philosophy and history. In the year 1842–3, as editor of the RheinischeZeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discusswhat is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhenish Land-tag on forest thefts and the division of landed property; the official polemicstarted by Herr von Schaper, then Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province, againstthe Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and finallythe debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instanceto turn my attention to economic questions. On the other hand, at that timewhen good intentions “to push forward” often took the place of factual knowl-edge, an echo of French socialism and communism, slightly tinged by phi-losophy, was noticeable in the Rheinische Zeitung. I objected to this dilettan-tism, but at the same time frankly admitted in a controversy with the AllgemeineAugsburger Zeitung that my previous studies did not allow me to express anyopinion on the content of the French theories. When the publishers of theRheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more compliant policy onthe part of the paper it might be possible to secure the abrogation of the deathsentence passed upon it, I eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw fromthe public stage to my study.

The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was acritical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction tothis work being published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher issued in


Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relationsnor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on thebasis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on thecontrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of whichHegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenthcentury, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civilsociety, however, has to be sought in political economy. The study of this,which I began in Paris, I continued in Brussels, where I moved owing to anexpulsion order issued by M. Guizot. The general conclusion at which I arrivedand which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can besummarized as follows. In the social production of their existence, meninevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will,namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the develop-ment of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations ofproduction constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponddefinite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material lifeconditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is notthe consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social exis-tence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development,the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existingrelations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legalterms—with the property relations within the framework of which they haveoperated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces theserelations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. Thechanges in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transforma-tion of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformationsit is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation ofthe economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the pre-cision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philo-sophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of thisconflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what hethinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation byits consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explainedfrom the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between thesocial forces of production and the relations of production. No social order isever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient havebeen developed, and new superior relations of production never replace olderones before the material conditions for their existence have matured withinthe framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such


tasks as it is able to solve; since closer examination will always show that theproblem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution arealready present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asi-atic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production may be des-ignated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the socialprocess of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antago-nism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social condi-tions of existence—but the productive forces developing within bourgeoissociety create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism.The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

Friedrich Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas bycorrespondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the critique ofeconomic categories (printed in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher), arrivedby another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England [The Con-dition of the Working Class in England]) at the same result as I, and when inthe spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forthtogether our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philos-ophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. Theintention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy.The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publish-ers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstancesit could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criti-cism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main pur-pose—self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which at that time we pre-sented one or another aspect of our views to the public, I shall mention onlythe Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, anda Discours sur le libre échange, which I myself published. The salient points ofour conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, formin my Misère de la philosophie [The Poverty of Philosophy]. This book, whichwas aimed at Proudhon, appeared in 1847. The publication of an essay on Wage-Labor written in German in which I combined the lectures I had held on thissubject at the German Workers’ Association in Brussels, was interrupted by theFebruary Revolution and my forcible removal from Belgium in consequence.

The publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849 and sub-sequent events cut short my economic studies, which I could only resume inLondon in 1850. The enormous amount of material relating to the history ofpolitical economy assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London isa convenient vantagepoint for the observation of bourgeois society, and finallythe new stage of development which this society seemed to have entered with


the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to start againfrom the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material.These studies led partly of their own accord to apparently quite remote sub-jects on which I had to spend a certain amount of time. But it was in partic-ular the imperative necessity of earning my living which reduced the time atmy disposal. My collaboration, continued now for eight years, with the NewYork Tribune, the leading Anglo-American newspaper, necessitated an exces-sive fragmentation of my studies, for I wrote only exceptionally newspaper cor-respondence in the strict sense. Since a considerable part of my contributionsconsisted of articles dealing with important economic events in Britain and onthe Continent, I was compelled to become conversant with practical detailswhich, strictly speaking, lie outside the sphere of political economy.

This sketch of the course of my studies in the domain of political econ-omy is intended merely to show that my views—no matter how they may bejudged and how little they conform to the interested prejudices of the rulingclasses—are the outcome of conscientious research carried on over many years.At the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be made:

Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospettoOgni viltà convien che qui sia morta.1

Karl MarxLondon, January 1859

NOTE

1. Dante, Divine Comedy, Canto III, lines 14–15: “Here all distrust must be abandoned /here all cowardice must die.”


In an anthology dedicated to Marx’s writings on religion, whyinclude a section on bad and good work? For Marx, work expresses the humanspirit: our human creativity, our suffering, our struggle, and our transcendence. Thefinal product of our work is ourselves as an unfinished and still-evolving species. Itis in work that we can see the human spirit at work, even when we can glimpsethat spirit only through suffering, through the darkened mirror of estrangement.

The primary documents of Marx on work are his essays on “Estranged Labor”from the Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and The CommunistManifesto (1848). The first is a difficult read and the second, while easy to read, is atightly argued text. The essays on money that are also included here begin a dis-course on fetishism and the commodification of human values that continues toengage scholars to this day. It is important to note that Marx mostly wrote aboutbad work. We have to infer from his indictment of human labor under the condi-tions of capitalism what he might mean by good work. And clearly, Marx mustaddress why so many workers do not think of work under capitalism as bad, butinstead think of it and experience it as good.

We have prepared the way for that discussion in the preceding section byexamining the dialectic of human consciousness with the already established (but

113

P A R T III

Bad Work/Good Work

never finished) material world. Consciousness can become false consciousness—which is consciousness simply absorbed into and reflecting the givenness of theworld, but not critically reflecting upon it, not passionately striving for the “not yet”hidden in the already of that world. We can make this more concrete. Under capi-talism, the individual worker struggles to get money, struggles to make a living. Atfirst, the worker does not struggle as part of a class against the power of thatpeculiar kind of money called capital, which decides where factories will be builtand where factories will close.

At first, the consciousness of the worker is enmeshed in the given world and itseveryday necessity of competing with other workers to find work. Even whenorganized into a union, workers will at first identify only with fellow national work-ers and against workers in other nations. The result is that, for a while, workers will“fight the enemies of their [class] enemies.” They will fight and die in wars declaredby the capitalists (for control of lands and markets) whose celebrated victory isalways a victory only for capitalists. With victory comes defeat for workers, as capi-talists send their investment capital overseas where the work force, under nowfriendly foreign governments, will work for far cheaper wages.

Why will the indigenous capitalist class do this? Is it because they are personallyevil? No, it is because they must compete with other capitalists, and in that competi-tion discover that, whatever their national loyalties, they must seek again and againlower paid workers wherever those can be found around the world. The iron law ofprofits—which can only be precariously won in the ongoing warfare of global capital-ism—produces both “efficiencies of production” and a highway (ever expanding) ofpreviously employed but now abandoned workers, most of whom will have to findwork at lower pay. The hope for Marx in all of this is what he sees as a fatal, internalcontradiction in global capitalism: Capitalism needs well-paid workers as consumersto buy its products, but the capitalists cannot afford to pay their workers enough todo so. The result will be “a crisis of overproduction”—a crisis that will create in work-ers a new consciousness. Marx thought that workers, driven by crisis, would eventu-ally awaken to these international class realities and begin a common struggle.

In “Estranged Labor” Marx analyzes the basic forms of alienated work: (1) lossby the worker of the product (which then becomes a powerful world of commodi-ties the worker must “buy back”); (2) estrangement from the productive processitself (which includes alienation from other workers but also alienation from ourextended body, the material world, which is the intimate context of our labor); and(3) estrangement from our “species being” (our “free conscious life activity”), whichbecomes instead a mere means for individual survival. In The Communist ManifestoMarx gives an astonishing account—written over 150 years ago!—of just how pow-erful, how utterly transforming of everyday life the capitalist revolution has beenand continues to be. It has altered more profoundly in three centuries both the

114 Part III: Bad Work/Good Work

means of production and the social relations those means of production createthan all the previous millennia of human evolution.

In what will appear to many readers as an extraordinary claim, Marx will beginChapter I of The Manifesto with the sentence: “The history of all hitherto existingsociety is the history of class struggles.” This is surely not the way our history booksare written, nor is it how most of us think about or conceive the past. For Marx,that is not an accident. The written memory of the past is written by the class win-ners of the past. For a while it was the past of princes and of prelates, of castlesand cathedrals–the kinds of things tourists go to see in Europe. Now, history iswritten as the past of a new ruling class, the class of international bankers andinvestors, who make material and visible their exploits not in castles or cathedralsbut in global shopping malls.

Much of this talk about class struggle will sound strange. Again, for Marx thatis not strange when one considers that the ruling class will always produce “theruling ideas of an era.” The official explanations of “what is going on” will alwaysbe the ideological mask of power and privilege. “Upward mobility,” “equal opportu-nity,” “in a free country anybody can become somebody”—all these ruling ideas inour society reduce our hopes to those of individuals striving for success and thusblind us to the realities of global class relations. The result is that when competingfor work we blame other workers (women, blacks, immigrants, foreign workers) forour suffering, and betray our class solidarities as workers because we don’t see theglobal economic structures that unite us in our suffering.

“Bad Work—Good Work,” seemingly out of place in a book focusing upon reli-gion, in fact provides the bridge from Marx’s philosophy of dialectical materialismto our fourth section on “The Criticism of Religion.” For Marx, religion is, at itsheart, the expression of and protest against suffering. And bad work produces suf-fering. And the dream of better work, which provides hope at first, only deepensthat suffering.

PREFACE, “EARLY ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS”(1844)

In the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher I announced a critique ofjurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of the

Hegelian philosophy of right. While preparing this for publication, I found thatto combine criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the var-ious subjects themselves was quite unsuitable; it hampered the developmentof the argument and made it more difficult to follow. Moreover, the wealth and

Preface, “Early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” (1844) 115

diversity of the subjects to be dealt with would have fitted into a single workonly if I had written in aphorisms, and an aphoristic presentation, for its part,would have given the impression of arbitrary systematization. I shall thereforepublish the critique of law, morals, politics, etc., in a series of separate, inde-pendent pamphlets and finally attempt, in a special work, to present them onceagain as a connected whole, to show the relationship between the parts andto try to provide a critique of the speculative treatment of the material. Thatis why the present work only touches on the interconnection of political econ-omy and the state, law, morals, civil life, etc., in so far as political economyitself particularly touches on these subjects.

It is hardly necessary to assure the reader who is familiar with politicaleconomy that I arrived at my conclusions through an entirely empirical analy-sis based on an exhaustive critical study of political economy.

It goes without saying that I have made use of German socialist works inaddition to the French and English socialists. But the only original Germanworks of any interest in this field—apart from those by Weitling—are theessays by Hess in Einundzwanzig Bogen and Engels’ Outlines of a Critique of Polit-ical Economy in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher; in the last-mentionedpublication I too indicated in a very general way the basic elements of the pres-ent work.

It is only with Feuerbach that positive humanistic and naturalistic criticismbegins. The less strident his writings are, the more certain, profound, com-prehensive, and lasting is their influence; they are the only writings sinceHegel’s Phenomenology and Logic to contain a real theoretical revolution.

In contrast to the critical theologians [Bruno Bauer et al.] of our time, Iconsidered the concluding chapter of the present work (a critical analysis ofthe Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian philosophy in general) to be essential, sincesuch a task has not yet been completed. Their failure to go to the root of the mat-ter is inevitable, since even the critical theologian is still a theologian. Eitherhe must start out from certain presuppositions of philosophy which he con-siders authoritative or, if in the process of criticism and as a result of otherpeople’s discoveries he begins to doubt these philosophical presuppositions,he abandons them in a cowardly and indefensible way, he abstracts from themand he demonstrates his enthralment to them and his resentment of thisenthralment purely in a negative, unconscious, and sophistical way.

On close investigation theological criticism, although it was a truly pro-gressive factor at the beginning of the movement, is in the final analysis noth-ing more than the culmination and consequence of the old philosophical, andespecially Hegelian, transcendence distorted into a theological caricature. Else-where I shall describe in detail this interesting example of historical justice,


this Nemesis, which has now burdened theology—always philosophy’s sorepoint—with the additional task of portraying in itself the negative dissolutionof philosophy, i.e. its process of decay.

“ESTRANGED LABOR” (1844)

With these next writings Marx establishes the battleground upon which hewill oppose classical British political economy. John Locke and AdamSmith both announced and defended the capitalist revolution, a revolu-tion that now embraces and steers the world. These essays by the youngMarx present to the reader the most fundamental criticism yet made ofthat way of organizing human life. When put together with The Commu-nist Manifesto which follows, we find before us a denunciation of capital-ists as a rootless ruling class chasing around the world to find the cheap-est workers. We find, therefore, the inevitability of class struggle asworkers at first collide with other workers in the struggle to find work andthen discover that their mutual enemy is capital, i.e., that particular kindof money that decides where factories will close and where factories willopen. We find the idea of fetishism, the turning of all values (includingthe value of human persons) into the value assigned to commodities inthe market. And we find the extraordinary claim that under the conditionsof global capitalism there is in reality only one kind of freedom—FreeTrade—a freedom that reduces all other freedoms to a function of itself.

We have started out from the premises of political economy. We haveaccepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private prop-

erty; the separation of labor, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit,and capital; the division of labor; competition; the concept of exchange value,etc. From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown thatthe worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretchedcommodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to thepower and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of com-petition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restora-tion of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinctionbetween capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrialworker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes ofproperty owners and propertyless workers.

“Estranged Labor” (1844) 117

Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does notexplain it. It grasps the material process of private property, the process throughwhich it actually passes, in general and abstract formulae which it then takesas laws. It does not comprehend these laws, i.e. it does not show how they arisefrom the nature of private property. Political economy fails to explain the rea-son for the division between labor and capital, between capital and land. Forexample, when it defines the relation of wages to profit it takes the interestsof the capitalists as the basis of its analysis; i.e. it assumes what it is supposedto explain. Similarly, competition is frequently brought into the argument andexplained in terms of external circumstances. Political economy teaches usnothing about the extent to which these external and apparently accidentalcircumstances are only the expression of a necessary development. We haveseen how exchange itself appears to political economy as an accidental fact.The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed and the warof the avaricious—competition.

Precisely because political economy fails to grasp the interconnectionswithin the movement, it was possible to oppose, for example, the doctrine ofcompetition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to thedoctrine of the guild, and the doctrine of the division of landed property tothe doctrine of the great estate; for competition, craft freedom, and divisionof landed property were developed and conceived only as accidental, delib-erate, violent consequences of monopoly, of the guilds and of feudal propertyand not as their necessary, inevitable, and natural consequences.

We now have to grasp the essential connection between private property,greed, the separation of labor, capital, and landed property, exchange andcompetition, value and the devaluation [Entwertung] of man, monopoly, andcompetition, etc.—the connection between this entire system of estrangement[Entfremdung] and the money system.

We must avoid repeating the mistake of the political economist, who baseshis explanations on some imaginary primordial condition. Such a primordialcondition explains nothing. It simply pushes the question into the grey andnebulous distance. It assumes as facts and events what it is supposed to deduce,namely the necessary relationship between two things, between, for example,the division of labor and exchange. Similarly, theology explains the origin ofevil by the fall of man, i.e. it assumes as a fact in the form of history what itshould explain.

We shall start out from a present-day economic fact.The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his

production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an evercheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of


the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the worldof things. Labor not only produces commodities; it also produces itself andthe workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which itproduces commodities in general.

This fact simply means that the object that labor produces, its product,stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.The product of labor is labor embodied and made material in an object, it isthe objectification of labor. The realization of labor is its objectification. In thesphere of political economy this realization of labor appears as a loss of realityfor the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appro-priation as estrangement, as alienation [Entäusserung].

So much does the realization of labor appear as loss of reality that theworker loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much doesobjectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of theobjects he needs most not only for life but also for work. Work itself becomesan object which he can only obtain through an enormous effort and with spas-modic interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear asestrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he pos-sess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital.

All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the workeris related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is clear that,according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, themore powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into beingover against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the lessthey belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God,the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; butnow it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity,therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his laboris, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. Theexternalization [Entäusserung] of the worker in his product means not only thathis labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him,independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as anautonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object con-fronts him as hostile and alien.

Let us now take a closer look at objectification, at the production of theworker, and the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product, that thisentails.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous exter-nal world. It is the material in which his labor realizes itself, in which it is activeand from which and by means of which it produces.


But just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense thatlabor cannot live without objects on which to exercise itself, so also it providesthe means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means of physical subsis-tence of the worker.

The more the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature,through his labor, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in tworespects: firstly, the sensuous external world becomes less and less an objectbelonging to his labor, a means of life of his labor; and secondly, it becomesless and less a means of life in the immediate sense, a means for the physicalsubsistence of the worker.

In these two respects, then, the worker becomes a slave of his object;firstly in that he receives an object of labor, i.e. he receives work, and secondlyin that he receives means of subsistence. Firstly, then, so that he can exist as aworker, and secondly as a physical subject. The culmination of this slavery isthat it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject andonly as a physical subject that he is a worker.

(The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed according tothe laws of political economy in the following way: the more the worker pro-duces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more worth-less he becomes; the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen theworker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker; themore powerful the work, the more powerless the worker; the more intelligentthe work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement in the nature of labor by ignoringthe direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. It is true thatlabor produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker.It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but defor-mity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it casts some of theworkers back into barbarous forms of labor and turns others into machines.It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.

The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the workerto the objects of his production. The relationship of the rich man to the objectsof production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first rela-tionship, and confirms it. Later we shall consider this second aspect. There-fore when we ask what is the essential relationship of labor, we are asking aboutthe relationship of the worker to production.

Up to now we have considered the estrangement, the alienation of theworker only from one aspect, i.e. his relationship to the products of his labor. Butestrangement manifests itself not only in the result, but also in the act of pro-duction, within the activity of production itself. How could the product of the


worker’s activity confront him as something alien if it were not for the fact thatin the act of production he was estranging himself from himself? After all, theproduct is simply the résumé of the activity, of the production. So if the prod-uct of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alien-ation of activity, the activity of alienation. The estrangement of the object oflabor merely summarizes the estrangement, the alienation in the activity oflabor itself.

What constitutes the alienation of labor?Firstly, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to

his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, butdenies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mentaland physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence theworker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he doesnot feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home whenhe is working. His labor is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labor.It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needsoutside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soonas no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague. Exter-nal labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, ofmortification. Finally, the external character of labor for the worker is demon-strated by the fact that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it hebelongs not to himself but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activ-ity of the human imagination, the human brain, and the human heart detachesitself from the individual and reappears as the alien activity of a god or of adevil, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. Itbelongs to another, it is a loss of his self.

The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in hisanimal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwellingand adornment—while in his human functions he is nothing more than ananimal.

It is true that eating, drinking, and procreating, etc., are also genuinehuman functions. However, when abstracted from other aspects of humanactivity and turned into final and exclusive ends, they are animal.

We have considered the act of estrangement of practical human activity,of labor, from two aspects: (1) the relationship of the worker to the product oflabor as an alien object that has power over him. This relationship is at thesame time the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects,as an alien world confronting him in hostile opposition. (2) The relationshipof labor to the act of production within labor. This relationship is the relation-ship of the worker to his own activity as something which is alien and does


not belong to him, activity as passivity [Leiden], power as impotence, procre-ation as emasculation, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his per-sonal life—for what is life but activity?—as an activity directed against him-self, which is independent of him and does not belong to him.Self-estrangement, as compared with the estrangement of the object [Sache]mentioned above.

We now have to derive a third feature of estranged labor from the two wehave already looked at.

Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoreticallymakes the species—both his own and those of other things—his object, butalso (and this is simply another way of saying the same thing) because he looksupon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself asa universal and therefore free being.

Species-life, both for man and for animals, consists physically in the factthat man, like animals, lives from inorganic nature; and because man is moreuniversal than animals, so too is the area of inorganic nature from which helives more universal. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., theoreti-cally form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of science and partlyas objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, his spiritual means of life,which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and digest them—so too inpractice they form a part of human life and human activity. In a physical senseman lives only from these natural products, whether in the form of nourish-ment, heating, clothing, shelter, etc. The universality of man manifests itselfin practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganicbody, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object, and thetool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature inso far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body,and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To saythat man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that natureis linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

Estranged labor not only (1) estranges nature from man and (2) estrangesman from himself, from his own active function, from his vital activity; becauseof this it also estranges man from his species. It turns his species-life into a meansfor his individual life. Firstly it estranges species-life and individual life, andsecondly it turns the latter, in its abstract form, into the purpose of the for-mer, also in its abstract and estranged form.

For in the first place labor, life activity, productive life itself appears to manonly as a means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve physicalexistence. But productive life is species-life. It is life-producing life. The wholecharacter of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life


activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man.Life itself appears only as a means of life.

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct fromthat activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of hiswill and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determinationwith which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes manfrom animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being. Or rather,he is a conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him, only because heis a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estrangedlabor reverses the relationship so that man, just because he is a conscious being,makes his life activity, his being [Wesen], a mere means for his existence.

The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganicnature, is proof that man is a conscious species-being, i.e. a being which treatsthe species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being. It is true thatanimals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver,the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or those of theiryoung; they produce one-sidedly, while man produces universally; they pro-duce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while manproduces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only infreedom from such need; they produce only themselves, while man reproducesthe whole of nature; their products belong immediately to their physical bod-ies, while man freely confronts his own product. Animals produce only accord-ing to the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while manis capable of producing according to the standards of every species and ofapplying to each object its inherent standard; hence man also produces inaccordance with the laws of beauty.

It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective that man really proveshimself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Throughit nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is thereforethe objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself not onlyintellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can there-fore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created. In tearing awaythe object of his production from man, estranged labor therefore tears awayfrom him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advan-tage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, istaken from him.

In the same way as estranged labor reduces spontaneous and free activityto a means, it makes man’s species-life a means of his physical existence.

Consciousness, which man has from his species, is transformed throughestrangement so that species-life becomes a means for him.


(3) Estranged labor therefore turns man’s species-being—both nature andhis intellectual species-powers—into a being alien to him and a means of hisindividual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as itexists outside him, from his spiritual essence [Wesen], his human essence.

(4) An immediate consequence of man’s estrangement from the productof his labor, his life activity, his species-being, is the estrangement of man fromman. When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is trueof man’s relationship to his labor, to the product of his labor, and to himself,is also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labor and the objectof the labor of other men.

In general, the proposition that man is estranged from his species-beingmeans that each man is estranged from the others and that all are estrangedfrom man’s essence.

Man’s estrangement, like all relationships of man to himself, is realized andexpressed only in man’s relationship to other men.

In the relationship of estranged labor each man therefore regards the otherin accordance with the standard and the situation in which he as a worker findshimself.

We started out from an economic fact, the estrangement of the worker andof his production. We gave this fact conceptual form: estranged, alienated labor.We have analyzed this concept, and in so doing merely analyzed an economicfact.

Let us now go on to see how the concept of estranged, alienated labor mustexpress and present itself in reality.

If the product of labor is alien to me and confronts me as an alien power,to whom does it then belong?

To a being other than me.Who is this being?The gods? It is true that in early times most production—e.g. temple build-

ing, etc., in Egypt, India, and Mexico—was in the service of the gods, just asthe product belonged to the gods. But the gods alone were never the mastersof labor. The same is true of nature. And what a paradox it would be if themore man subjugates nature through his labor and the more divine miraclesare made superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more he is forced to forgothe joy of production and the enjoyment of the product out of deference tothese powers.

The alien being to whom labor and the product of labor belong, in whoseservice labor is performed and for whose enjoyment the product of labor iscreated, can be none other than man himself.


If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, and if it confrontshim as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to a man otherthan the worker. If his activity is a torment for him, it must provide pleasureand enjoyment for someone else. Not the gods, not nature, but only man him-self can be this alien power over men.

Consider the above proposition that the relationship of man to himselfbecomes objective and real for him only through his relationship to other men.If therefore he regards the product of his labor, his objectified labor, as an alien,hostile, and powerful object which is independent of him, then his relation-ship to that object is such that another man—alien, hostile, powerful, and inde-pendent of him—is its master. If he relates to his own activity as unfree activ-ity, then he relates to it as activity in the service, under the rule, coercion, andyoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested inthe relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature. Thusreligious self-estrangement is necessarily manifested in the relationshipbetween layman and priest, or, since we are here dealing with the spiritualworld, between layman and mediator, etc. In the practical, real world, self-estrangement can manifest itself only in the practical, real relationship to othermen. The medium through which estrangement progresses is itself a practicalone. So through estranged labor man not only produces his relationship to theobject and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also pro-duces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and prod-uct, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as hecreates his own production as a loss of reality, a punishment, and his own prod-uct as a loss, a product which does not belong to him, so he creates the dom-ination of the non-producer over production and its product. Just as heestranges from himself his own activity, so he confers upon the stranger anactivity which does not belong to him.

Up to now we have considered the relationship only from the side of theworker. Later on we shall consider it from the side of the non-worker.

Thus through estranged, alienated labor the worker creates the relationshipof another man, who is alien to labor and stands outside it, to that labor. Therelation of the worker to labor creates the relation of the capitalist—or what-ever other word one chooses for the master of labor—to that labor. Private prop-erty is therefore the product, result, and necessary consequence of alienatedlabor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus derives from an analysis of the concept of alienatedlabor, i.e. alienated man, estranged labor, estranged life, estranged man.


It is true that we took the concept of alienated labor (alienated life) frompolitical economy as a result of the movement of private property. But it is clearfrom an analysis of this concept that, although private property appears as thebasis and cause of alienated labor, it is in fact its consequence, just as the godswere originally not the cause but the effect of the confusion in men’s minds.Later, however, this relationship becomes reciprocal.

It is only when the development of private property reaches its ultimatepoint of culmination that this, its secret, re-emerges: namely, that it is (a) theproduct of alienated labor and (b) the means through which labor is alienated,the realization of this alienation.

This development throws light upon a number of hitherto unresolved con-troversies.

(1) Political economy starts out from labor as the real soul of production,and yet gives nothing to labor and everything to private property. Proudhonhas dealt with this contradiction by deciding for labor and against privateproperty. But we have seen that this apparent contradiction is the contradic-tion of estranged labor with itself and that political economy has merely for-mulated the laws of estranged labor.

It therefore follows for us that wages and private property are identical: forwhere the product, the object of labor, pays for the labor itself, wages are onlya necessary consequence of the estrangement of labor; similarly, where wagesare concerned, labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages.We intend to deal with this point in more detail later on: for the present weshall merely draw a few conclusions.

An enforced rise in wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including thefact that such an anomalous situation could only be prolonged by force) wouldtherefore be nothing more than better pay for slaves and would not mean anincrease in human significance or dignity for either the worker or the labor.

Even the equality of wages, which Proudhon demands, would merely trans-form the relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of allmen to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are an immediate consequence of estranged labor, and estrangedlabor is the immediate cause of private property. If the one falls, then the othermust fall too.

(2) It further follows from the relation of estranged labor to private prop-erty that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servi-tude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers. Thisis not because it is only a question of their emancipation, but because in theiremancipation is contained universal human emancipation. The reason for thisuniversality is that the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation


of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are nothing but mod-ifications and consequences of this relation.

Just as we have arrived at the concept of private property through an analy-sis of the concept of estranged, alienated labor, so with the help of these twofactors it is possible to evolve all economic categories, and in each of these cat-egories, e.g. trade, competition, capital, money, we shall identify only a par-ticular and developed expression of these basic constituents.

But before we go on to consider this configuration let us try to solve twofurther problems.

(1) We have to determine the general nature of private property, as it hasarisen out of estranged labor, in its relation to truly human and social property.

(2) We have taken the estrangement of labor, its alienation, as a fact and wehave analyzed that fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate his labor,to estrange it? How is this estrangement founded in the nature of human devel-opment? We have already gone a long way towards solving this problem bytransforming the question of the origin of private property into the question ofthe relationship of alienated labor to the course of human development. For inspeaking of private property one imagines that one is dealing with somethingexternal to man. In speaking of labor one is dealing immediately with man him-self. This new way of formulating the problem already contains its solution.

ad (1): The general nature of private property and its relationship to truly humanproperty.

Alienated labor has resolved itself for us into two component parts whichmutually condition one another, or which are merely different expressions ofone and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alien-ation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true admission tocitizenship.

We have considered the one aspect, alienated labor, in relation to the workerhimself, i.e. the relation of alienated labor to itself. And as product, as necessaryconsequence of this relationship we have found the property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labor. Private property as the material, summarizedexpression of alienated labor embraces both relations—the relation of the workerto labor and to the product of his labor and the non-worker and the relation of thenon-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor.

We have already seen that, in relation to the worker who appropriatesnature through his labor, appropriation appears as estrangement, self-activityas activity for another and of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, productionof an object as loss of that object to an alien power, to an alien man. Let usnow consider the relation between this man, who is alien to labor and to theworker, and the worker, labor, and the object of labor.


The first thing to point out is that everything which appears for the workeras an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears for the non-worker as a sit-uation of alienation, of estrangement.

Secondly, the real, practical attitude of the worker in production and to theproduct (as a state of mind) appears for the non-worker who confronts himas a theoretical attitude.

Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which theworker does against himself, but he does not do against himself what he doesagainst the worker.

“PRIVATE PROPERTY AND COMMUNISM” (1844)

The antithesis between propertylessness and property is still an indif-ferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, its inner rela-

tion, not yet grasped as contradiction, as long as it is not understood as theantithesis between labor and capital. In its initial form this antithesis can man-ifest itself even without the advanced development of private property, as forexample in ancient Rome, in Turkey, etc. In such cases it does not yet appearas established by private property itself. But labor, the subjective essence ofprivate property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labor as exclu-sion of labor, constitute private property in its developed relation of contra-diction: a vigorous relation, therefore, driving towards resolution.

The supersession [Aufhebung] of self-estrangement follows the same courseas self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objectiveaspect, but still with labor as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore cap-ital, which is to be abolished “as such” (Proudhon). Or the particular form oflabor—leveled down, parceled, and therefore unfree—is taken as the sourceof the harmfulness of private property and its humanly estranged existence. Forexample, Fourier, like the Physiocrats, regarded agriculture as at least the bestform of labor, while Saint-Simon on the other hand declared industrial laboras such to be the essence and consequently wants exclusive rule by the indus-trialists and the improvement of the condition of the workers. Finally, com-munism1 is the positive expression of the abolition of private property and atfirst appears as universal private property. In grasping this relation in its uni-versality, communism is

(1) in its initial form only a generalization and completion of that relation(of private property). As such it appears in a dual form: on the one hand thedomination of material property bulks so large that it threatens to destroy


everything which is not capable of being possessed by everyone as privateproperty; it wants to abstract from talent, etc., by force. Physical, immediatepossession is the only purpose of life and existence as far as this communismis concerned; the category of worker is not abolished but extended to all men;the relation of private property remains the relation of the community to theworld of things; ultimately this movement to oppose universal private prop-erty to private property is expressed in bestial form—marriage (which is admit-tedly a form of exclusive private property) is counterposed to the community ofwomen, where women become communal and common property. One might saythat this idea of a community of women is the revealed secret of this as yet whollycrude and unthinking communism. Just as women are to go from marriageinto general prostitution, so the whole world of wealth—i.e. the objectiveessence of man—is to make the transition from the relation of exclusive mar-riage with the private owner to the relation of universal prostitution with thecommunity. This communism, inasmuch as it negates the personality of manin every sphere, is simply the logical expression of the private property whichis this negation. Universal envy constituting itself as a power is the hidden formin which greed reasserts itself and satisfies itself, but in another way. Thethoughts of every piece of private property as such are at least turned againstricher private property in the form of envy and the desire to level everythingdown; hence these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. Thecrude communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to leveldown on the basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited meas-ure. How little this abolition of private property is a true appropriation isshown by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization,and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined man who hasno needs and who has not even reached the stage of private property, let alonegone beyond it.

(For crude communism) the community is simply a community of laborand equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the com-munity as universal capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised to an imag-inary universality—labor as the condition in which everyone is placed and cap-ital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

In the relationship with woman, as the prey and handmaid of communallust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, forthe secret of this relationship has its unambiguous decisive, open, and revealedexpression in the relationship of man to woman and in the manner in whichthe direct, natural species-relationship is conceived. The immediate, natural,necessary relation of human being to human being is the relationship of manto woman. In this natural species-relationship the relation of man to nature is

“Private Property and Communism” (1844) 129

immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately hisrelation to nature, his own natural condition. Therefore this relationship revealsin a sensuous form, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which thehuman essence has become nature for man or nature has become the humanessence for man. It is possible to judge from this relationship the entire levelof development of mankind. It follows from the character of this relationshiphow far man as a species-being, as man, has become himself and grasped him-self; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human beingto human being. It therefore demonstrates the extent to which man’s naturalbehavior has become human or the extent to which his human essence hasbecome a natural essence for him, the extent to which his human nature hasbecome nature for him. This relationship also demonstrates the extent to whichman’s needs have become human needs, hence the extent to which the other,as a human being, has become a need for him, the extent to which in his mostindividual existence he is at the same time a communal being.

The first positive abolition of private property—crude communism—istherefore only a manifestation of the vileness of private property trying to estab-lish itself as the positive community.

(2) Communism (a) still of a political nature, democratic or despotic; (b)with the abolition of the state, but still essentially incomplete and influencedby private property, i.e. by the estrangement of man. In both forms commu-nism already knows itself as the reintegration or return of man into himself,the supersession of man’s self-estrangement; but since it has not yet compre-hended the positive essence of private property or understood the humannature of need, it is still held captive and contaminated by private property.True, it has understood its concept, but not yet its essence.

(3) Communism2 is the positive supersession of private property as humanself-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essencethrough and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social,i.e. human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takesplace within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This com-munism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully devel-oped humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflictbetween man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution ofthe conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.

The entire movement of history is therefore both the actual act of creationof communism—the birth of its empirical existence—and, for its thinkingconsciousness, the comprehended and known movement of its becoming; whereas


the other communism, which is not yet fully developed, seeks in isolated his-torical forms opposed to private property a historical proof for itself, a proofdrawn from what already exists, by wrenching isolated moments from theirproper places in the process of development (a hobby horse Cabet, Ville-gardelle, etc., particularly like to ride) and advancing them as proofs of its his-torical pedigree. But all it succeeds in showing is that by far the greater partof this development contradicts its assertions and that if it did once exist, thenthe very fact that it existed in the past refutes its claim to essential being [Wesen].

It is easy to see how necessary it is for the whole revolutionary movementto find both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of privateproperty or, to be more exact, of the economy.

This material, immediately sensuous private property is the material, sen-suous expression of estranged human life. Its movement—production and con-sumption—is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all previous pro-duction, i.e. the realization or reality of man. Religion, the family, the state,law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production andtherefore come under its general law. The positive supersession of private prop-erty, as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive supersessionof all estrangement, and the return of man from religion, the family, the state,etc., to his human, i.e. social existence. Religious estrangement as such takesplace only in the sphere of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economicestrangement is that of real life—its supersession therefore embraces bothaspects. Clearly the nature of the movement in different countries initiallydepends on whether the actual and acknowledged life of the people has itsbeing more in consciousness or in the external world, in ideal or in real life.Communism begins with atheism (Owen), but atheism is initially far frombeing communism, and is for the most part an abstraction. The philanthropyof atheism is therefore at first nothing more than an abstract philosophical phi-lanthropy, while that of communism is at once real and directly bent towardsaction.

We have seen how, assuming the positive supersession of private property,man produces man, himself and other men; how the object, which is the directactivity of his individuality, is at the same time his existence for other men, theirexistence, and their existence for him. Similarly, however, both the material oflabor and man as subject are the starting-point as well as the outcome of themovement (and the historical necessity of private property lies precisely in thefact that they must be this starting-point). So the social character is the generalcharacter of the whole movement; just as society itself produces man as man,so it is produced by him. Activity and consumption, both in their content andin their mode of existence, are social activity and social consumption. The human


essence of nature exists only for social man; for only here does nature exist forhim as a bond with other men, as his existence for others and their existencefor him, as the vital element of human reality; only here does it exist as the basisof his own human existence. Only here has his natural existence become hishuman existence and nature become man for him. Society is therefore the per-fected unity in essence of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, therealized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.3

Social activity and social consumption by no means exist solely in the formof a directly communal activity and a directly communal consumption, eventhough communal activity and communal consumption, i.e. activity and con-sumption that express and confirm themselves directly in real association withother men, occur wherever that direct expression of sociality [Gesellschaftlichkeit]springs from the essential nature of the content of the activity and is appropri-ate to the nature of the consumption.

But even if I am active in the field of science, etc.—an activity which I amseldom able to perform in direct association with other men—I am still sociallyactive because I am active as a man. It is not only the material of my activity—including even the language in which the thinker is active—which I receiveas a social product. My own existence is social activity. Therefore what I cre-ate from myself I create for society, conscious of myself as a social being.

My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that whose liv-ing form is the real community, society, whereas at present universal con-sciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such in hostile opposition toit. Hence the activity of my universal consciousness—as activity—is my theo-retical existence as a social being.

It is above all necessary to avoid once more establishing “society” as anabstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. Hisvital expression—even when it does not appear in the direct form of a com-munal expression, conceived in association with other men—is therefore anexpression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life arenot two distinct things, however much—and this is necessarily so—the modeof existence of individual life is a more particular or a more general mode ofthe species-life, or species-life a more particular or more general individual life.

As species-consciousness man confirms his real social life and merely repeatsin thought his actual existence; conversely, species-being confirms itself inspecies-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinkingbeing.

Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual—and itis just this particularity which makes him an individual and a real individualcommunal being—is just as much the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective


existence of thought and experienced society for itself; he also exists in real-ity as the contemplation and true enjoyment of social existence and as a total-ity of vital human expression.

It is true that thought and being are distinct, but at the same time they arein unity with one another.

Death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular indi-vidual, and seemingly contradicts their unity; but the particular individual isonly a particular species-being, and as such mortal.

(4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact thatman becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes an alien andinhuman object for himself, that his expression of life [Lebensäusserung] is hisalienation of life [Lebensentäusserung], and that his realization is a loss of real-ity, an alien reality, so the positive supersession of private property, i.e. the sen-suous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective manand of human works by and for man, should not be understood only in thesense of direct, one-sided consumption, of possession, of having. Man appropri-ates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man. All his human rela-tions to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, con-templating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving—in short, all the organs of hisindividuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in theirobjective approach or in their approach to the object the appropriation of thatobject. This appropriation of human reality, their approach to the object, is theconfirmation of human reality.4 It is human effectiveness and human suffering, forsuffering, humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self for man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is onlyours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly pos-sess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although pri-vate property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only asmeans of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor, and cap-italization.

Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced bythe simple estrangement of all these senses—the sense of having. So that itmight give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to thisabsolute poverty.

The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipa-tion of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation preciselybecause these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively as wellas objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has becomea social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore becometheoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own


sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man,5

and vice-versa. Need or enjoyment have therefore lost their egoistic nature, andnature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use.

Similarly, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my ownappropriation. Apart from these direct organs, social organs are therefore cre-ated in the form of society; for example, activity in direct association with oth-ers, etc. has become an organ of my life expression and a mode of appropria-tion of human life.

Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crudenon-human eye, the human ear in a different way from the crude ear, etc.

To sum up: it is only when man’s object becomes a human object or objec-tive man that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possiblewhen it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes a socialbeing for himself, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.

On the one hand, therefore, it is only when objective reality universallybecomes for man in society the reality of man’s essential powers, becomeshuman reality, and thus the reality of his own essential powers, that all objectsbecome for him the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realizehis individuality, his objects, i.e. he himself becomes the object. The manner inwhich they become his depends on the nature of the object and the nature ofthe essential power that corresponds to it; for it is just the determinateness ofthis relation that constitutes the particular, real mode of affirmation. An objectis different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the eye’s object is differ-ent from the ear’s. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its pecu-liar essence, and thus also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objec-tively real, living being. Man is therefore affirmed in the objective world notonly in thought but with all the senses.

On the other hand, let us look at the question in its subjective aspect: onlymusic can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful music hasno sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be the confirma-tion of one of my essential powers, i.e. can only be for me in so far as my essen-tial power exists for me as a subjective attribute (this is because the sense ofan object for me extends only as far as my sense extends, only has sense for asense that corresponds to that object). In the same way, and for the same rea-sons, the senses of social man are different from those of non-social man. Onlythrough the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth ofsubjective human sensitivity—a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, inshort, senses capable of human gratification—be either cultivated or created.For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the prac-tical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the


senses—all these come into being only through the existence of their objects,through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of allprevious history. Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only arestricted sense. For a man who is starving the human form of food does notexist, only its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present in its crud-est form, and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs from thatof animals. The man who is burdened with worries and needs has no sense forthe finest of plays; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value, andnot the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals; he lacks a mineralogicalsense; thus the objectification of the human essence, in a theoretical as wellas a practical respect, is necessary both in order to make man’s senses humanand to create an appropriate human sense for the whole of the wealth of human-ity and of nature.

Just as in its initial stages society is presented with all the material for thiscultural development through the movement of private property and of its wealthand poverty—both material and intellectual wealth and poverty—so the soci-ety that is fully developed produces man in all the richness of his being, the richman who is profoundly and abundantly endowed with all the senses, as its con-stant reality. It can be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism andmaterialism, activity and passivity [Leiden], lose their antithetical character, andhence their existence as such antitheses, only in the social condition; it can beseen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses themselves is possible onlyin a practical way, only through the practical energy of man, and how theirresolution is for that reason by no means only a problem of knowledge, buta real problem of life, a problem which philosophy was unable to solve pre-cisely because it treated it as a purely theoretical problem.

It can be seen how the history of industry and the objective existence ofindustry as it has developed is the open book of the essential powers of man,man’s psychology present in tangible form; up to now this history has not beengrasped in its connection with the nature of man, but only in an external util-itarian aspect, for man, moving in the realm of estrangement, was only capa-ble of conceiving the general existence of man—religion, or history in itsabstract and universal form of politics, art, literature, etc.—as the reality ofman’s essential powers and as man’s species-activity. In everyday, material indus-try (which can just as easily be considered as a part of that general develop-ment as that general development itself can be considered as a particular partof industry, since all human activity up to now has been labor, i.e. industry,self-estranged activity) we find ourselves confronted with the objectified pow-ers of the human essence, in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the formof estrangement. A psychology for which this book, the most tangible and


accessible part of history, is closed, can never become a real science with a gen-uine content. What indeed should we think of a science which primly abstractsfrom this large area of human labor, and fails to sense its own inadequacy, eventhough such an extended wealth of human activity says nothing more to itperhaps than what can be said in one word—”need,” “common need”?

The natural sciences have been prolifically active and have gathered togetheran ever growing mass of material. But philosophy has remained just as aliento them as they have remained alien to philosophy. Their momentary unionwas only a fantastic illusion. The will was there, but not the means. Even his-toriography only incidentally takes account of natural science, which it seesas contributing to enlightenment, utility, and a few great discoveries. But nat-ural science has intervened in and transformed human life all the more prac-tically through industry and has prepared the conditions for human emanci-pation, however much its immediate effect was to complete the process ofdehumanization. Industry is the real historical relationship of nature, and henceof natural science, to man. If it is then conceived as the exoteric revelation ofman’s essential powers, the human essence of nature or the natural essence ofman can also be understood. Hence natural science will lose its abstractlymaterial, or rather idealist, orientation and become the basis of a human sci-ence, just as it has already become—though in an estranged form—the basisof actual human life. The idea of one basis for life and another for science isfrom the very outset a lie. Nature as it comes into being in human history—in the act of creation of human society—is the true nature of man; hencenature as it comes into being through industry, though in an estranged form,is true anthropological nature.

Sense perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Onlywhen science starts out from sense perception in the dual form of sensuous con-sciousness and sensuous need—i.e. only when science starts out from nature—is it real science. The whole of history is a preparation, a development, for“man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness and for the needs of“man as man” to become [sensuous] needs. History itself is a real part of nat-ural history and of nature’s becoming man. Natural science will in time sub-sume the science of man just as the science of man will subsume natural sci-ence: there will be one science.

Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate sensuousnature for man is, immediately, human sense perception (an identical expres-sion) in the form of the other man who is present in his sensuous immediacyfor him. His own sense perception only exists as human sense perception forhimself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the sci-ence of man. Man’s first object—man—is nature, sense perception; and the par-


ticular sensuous human powers, since they can find objective realization onlyin natural objects, can find self-knowledge only in the science of nature in gen-eral. The element of thought itself, the element of the vital expression ofthought—language—is sensuous nature. The social reality of nature and humannatural science or the natural science of man are identical expressions.

It can be seen how the rich man and the wealth of human need take theplace of the wealth and poverty of political economy. The rich man is simulta-neously the man in need of a totality of vital human expression; he is the manin whom his own realization exists as inner necessity, as need. Given social-ism, not only man’s wealth but also his poverty acquire a human and hence asocial significance. Poverty is the passive bond which makes man experiencehis greatest wealth—the other man—as need. The domination of the objec-tive essence within me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is pas-sion, which here becomes the activity of my being.

(5) A being sees himself as independent only when he stands on his ownfeet, and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to him-self. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependentbeing. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only themaintenance of my life but also its creation, if he is the source of my life. Mylife is necessarily grounded outside itself if it is not my own creation. The cre-ation is therefore an idea which is very hard to exorcize from the popular con-sciousness. This consciousness is incapable of comprehending the self-mediatedbeing [Durchsichselbstsein] of nature and of man, since such a being contra-dicts all the palpable evidence of practical life.

The creation of the earth received a heavy blow from the science of geogeny,i.e. the science which depicts the formation of the earth, its coming to be, asa process of self-generation. Generatio dequivoca [spontaneous generation] isthe only practical refutation of the theory of creation.

Now it is easy to say to a particular individual what Aristotle said: You werebegotten by your father and your mother, which means that in you the mat-ing of two human beings, a human species-act, produced another humanbeing. Clearly, then, man also owes his existence to man in a physical sense.Therefore you should not only keep sight of the one aspect, the infinite pro-gression which leads you on to the question: “Who begot my father, his grand-father, etc.?” You should also keep in mind the circular movement sensuouslyperceptible in that progression whereby man reproduces himself in the act ofbegetting and thus always remains the subject. But you will reply: I grant youthis circular movement, but you must also grant me the right to progress backto the question: Who begot the first man, and nature in general? I can onlyanswer: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you


arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question does not arisefrom a standpoint to which I cannot reply because it is a perverse one. Askyourself whether that progression exists as such for rational thought. If youask about the creation of nature and of man, then you are abstracting fromnature and from man. You assume them as non-existent and want me to proveto you that they exist. My answer is: Give up your abstraction and you willthen give up your question. But if you want to hold on to your abstraction,then do so consistently, and if you assume the non-existence of man andnature, then assume also your own non-existence, for you are also nature andman. Do not think and do not ask me questions, for as soon as you think andask questions, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has nomeaning. Or are you such an egoist that you assume everything as non-exis-tent and still want to exist yourself?

You can reply: I do not want to assume the nothingness of nature, etc. Iam only asking how it arose, just as I might ask the anatomist about the for-mation of bones, etc.

But since for socialist man the whole of what is called world history is noth-ing more than the creation of man through human labor, and the developmentof nature for man, he therefore has palpable and incontrovertible proof of hisself-mediated birth, of his process of emergence. Since the essentiality [Wesen-haftigkeit] of man and of nature, man as the existence of nature for man andnature as the existence of man for man, has become practically and sensuouslyperceptible, the question of an alien being, a being above nature and man—aquestion which implies an admission of the unreality of nature and of man—has become impossible in practice. Atheism, which is a denial of this unreal-ity, no longer has any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, through whichnegation it asserts the existence of man. But socialism as such no longer needssuch mediation. Its starting-point is the theoretically and practically sensuous con-sciousness of man and of nature as essential beings. It is the positive self-con-sciousness of man, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, justas real life is positive reality no longer mediated through the abolition of pri-vate property, through communism. Communism is the act of positing as thenegation of the negation, and is therefore a real phase, necessary for the nextperiod of historical development, in the emancipation and recovery ofmankind. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of theimmediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human devel-opment—the form of human society.6


NOTES

1. “Communism” in this sense is, of course, the “crude communism” of utopian thinkerssuch as Fourier, Proudhon, and Babeuf, and is later contrasted with Marx’s own concep-tion of communism.

2. Having discussed the nature of “crude communism,” Marx now goes on to describehis own conception of communism.

3. K. M.: Prostitution is only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of theworker, and since prostitution is a relationship which includes not only the prostituted butalso the prostitutor—whose infamy is even greater—the capitalist is also included in thiscategory.

4. K. M.: It is therefore just as varied as the determinations of the human essence andactivities.

5. K. M.: In practice I can only relate myself to a thing in a human way if the thing isrelated in a human way to man.

6. The meaning of this sentence is unclear. “Communism . . . as such” is sometimestaken as referring to the “crude communism” discussed earlier. On the other hand, the sen-tence can be interpreted as meaning that communism is not the final stage in the devel-opment of humanity, but will in its turn be transcended by a richer and higher stage.

“MONEY” (1844)

If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological charac-teristics in the narrower sense, but are truly ontological affirmations of

his essence (nature), and if they only really affirm themselves in so far as theirobject exists sensuously for them, then it is clear:

(1) That their mode of affirmation is by no means one and the same, but ratherthat the different modes of affirmation constitute the particular characterof their existence, of their life. The mode in which the object exists forthem is the characteristic mode of their gratification.

(2) Where the sensuous affirmation is a direct annulment [Aufheben] of theobject in its independent form (eating, drinking, fashioning of objects,etc.), this is the affirmation of the object.

(3) In so far as man, and hence also his feelings, etc., are human, the affir-mation of the object by another is also his own gratification.

(4) Only through developed industry, i.e. through the mediation of privateproperty, does the ontological essence of human passion come into being,both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itselfa product of the self-formation of man through practical activity.

“Money” (1844) 139

(5) The meaning of private property, freed from its estrangement, is the existenceof essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and of activity.

Money, inasmuch as it possesses the property of being able to buy everythingand appropriate all objects, is the object most worth possessing. The univer-sality of this property is the basis of money’s omnipotence; hence it is regardedas an omnipotent being . . . Money is the pimp between need and object,between life and man’s means of life. But that which mediates my life alsomediates the existence of other men for me. It is for me the other person.

Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust:

What, man! confound it, hands and feetAnd head and backside, all are yours!And what we take while life is sweet,Is that to be declared not ours?Six stallions, say, I can afford,Is not their strength my property?I tear along, a sporting lord,As if their legs belonged to me.

Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods,I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens!Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.. . . Why, thisWill lug your priests and servants from your sides;Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:This yellow slaveWill knit and break religions; bless th’accurst;Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,And give them title, knee, and approbation,With senators on the bench: this is itThat makes the wappen’d widow wed again;She whom the spital-house and ulcerous soresWould cast the gorge at, this embalms and spicesTo th’ April day again. Come, damned earth,Thou common whore of mankind, that putt’st oddsAmong the rout of nations, I will make theeDo thy right nature.

And later on:

O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce‘Twixt natural son and sire! Thou bright defiler


Of Hymen’s purest bed! Thou valiant Mars!Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snowThat lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible god,That solder’st close impossibilities,And mak’st them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue,To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!Think, thy slave man rebels; and by thy virtueSet them into confounding odds, that beastsMay have the world in empire!

Shakespeare paints a brilliant picture of the nature of money. To understandhim, let us begin by expounding the passage from Goethe.

That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I canpay for, i.e. which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of the money. Thestronger the power of my money, the stronger am I. The properties of moneyare my, the possessor’s, properties and essential powers. Therefore what I amand what I can do is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly,but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am notugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money. Asan individual, I am lame, but money procures me twenty-four legs. Conse-quently, I am not lame. I am a wicked, dishonest, unscrupulous and stupidindividual, but money is respected, and so also is its owner. Money is the high-est good, and consequently its owner is also good. Moreover, money sparesme the trouble of being dishonest, and I am therefore presumed to be honest.I am mindless, but if money is the true mind of all things, how can its ownerbe mindless? What is more, he can buy clever people for himself, and is nothe who has power over clever people cleverer than them? Through money Ican have anything the human heart desires. Do I not therefore possess allhuman abilities? Does not money therefore transform all my incapacities intotheir opposite?

If money is the bond which ties me to human life and society to me, whichlinks me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds? Can it notbind and loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal means of separation?It is the true agent of separation and the true cementing agent, it is the chemicalpower of society.

Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular:

(1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and naturalqualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion ofthings; it brings together impossibilities.

(2) It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples.

“Money” (1844) 141

The inversion and confusion of all human and natural qualities, the bringingtogether of impossibilities, the divine power of money lies in its nature as theestranged and alienating species-essence of man which alienates itself by sell-ing itself. It is the alienated capacity of mankind.

What I as a man cannot do, i.e. what all my individual powers cannot do,I can do with the help of money. Money therefore transforms each of theseessential powers into something which it is not, into its opposite.

If I desire a meal or want to take the mail coach because I am not strongenough to make the journey on foot, money can procure me both the mealand the mail coach, i.e. it transfers my wishes from the realm of imagination,it translates them from their existence as thought, imagination, and desires intotheir sensuous, real existence, from imagination into life, and from imaginedbeing into real being. In this mediating role money is the truly creative power.

Demand also exists for those who have no money, but their demand is sim-ply a figment of the imagination. For me or for any other third party it has noeffect, no existence. For me it therefore remains unreal and without an object.The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffectivedemand based on my need, my passion, my desire, etc., is the differencebetween being and thinking, between a representation which merely existswithin me and one which exists outside me as a real object.

If I have no money for travel, I have no need, i.e. no real and self-realiz-ing need, to travel. If I have a vocation to study, but no money for it, I haveno vocation to study, i.e. no real, true vocation. But if I really do not have anyvocation to study, but have the will and the money, then I have an effective voca-tion to do so. Money, which is the external, universal means and power—derived not from man as man and not from human society as society—to turnimagination into reality and reality into mere imagination, similarly turns realhuman and natural powers into purely abstract representations, and thereforeimperfections and tormenting phantoms, just as it turns real imperfections andphantoms—truly impotent powers which exist only in the individual’s fan-tasy—into real essential powers and abilities. Thus characterized, money is theuniversal inversion of individualities, which it turns into their opposites and towhose qualities it attaches contradictory qualities.

Money therefore appears as an inverting power in relation to the individ-ual and to those social and other bonds which claim to be essences in them-selves. It transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtueinto vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsenseinto reason and reason into nonsense.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds andexchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and exchange of all things,


an inverted world, the confusion and exchange of all natural and humanqualities.

He who can buy courage is brave, even if he is a coward. Money is notexchanged for a particular quality, a particular thing, or for any particular oneof the essential powers of man, but for the whole objective world of man andof nature. Seen from the standpoint of the person who possesses it, moneyexchanges every quality for every other quality and object, even if it is con-tradictory; it is the power which brings together impossibilities and forcescontradictions to embrace.

If we assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a humanone, then love can be exchanged only for love, trust for trust, and so on. Ifyou wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically educated person; if you wishto exercise influence on other men you must be the sort of person who has atruly stimulating and encouraging effect on others. Each one of your relationsto man—and to nature—must be a particular expression, corresponding to theobject of your will, of your real individual life. If you love unrequitedly, i.e. ifyour love as love does not call forth love in return, if through the vital expres-sion of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then yourlove is impotent, it is a misfortune.

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO (CHAPTER 1) (1848)

Published in 1848, this brief writing (we include only chapter one) dis-plays an extraordinary appreciation for the capitalist revolution as atrue and fundamental revolution, and of the capitalist class as revolu-tionaries. Here we find Marx developing all three of his most fundamen-tal categories of interpretation: (1) the means of production, (2) thesocial relations of production and (3) the social powers of production(which Marx acknowledges have been explosively expanded by capital-ism). We find presented briefly and somewhat obscurely what Marx con-sidered the fatal self-contradiction of capitalism. Once capitalism is fullyglobal, capitalists competing with other capitalists will be forced to pur-sue endlessly the cheapest possible labor. In that pursuit they will, timeand again, leave behind the once better paid workers that used to beable to buy as consumers what capitalists need to sell. What capitalismfinally produces, then, is its own grave—the crisis of overproduction—and its own grave diggers, workers as a self-conscious class united inpolitical struggle.

The Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1) (1848) 143

(CHAPTER 1) (1848)THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Aspecter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All thepowers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise

this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and Ger-man police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communis-tic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled backthe branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced oppositionparties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself

a power.II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole

world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nurs-ery tale of the specter of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in Lon-don, and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English,French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish languages.

BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS1

The history of all hitherto existing society2 is the history of class strug-gles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master3 andjourneyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposi-tion to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of soci-ety at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicatedarrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the MiddleAges, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; inalmost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudalsociety, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established newclasses, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of theold ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this dis-tinctive feature: It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is


more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classesdirectly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of theearliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie weredeveloped.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up freshground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, thecolonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means ofexchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, toindustry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionaryelement in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monop-olized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of thenew markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masterswere pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of laborbetween the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of laborin each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Evenmanufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolu-tionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by thegiant, modern industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrialmillionaires—the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discov-ery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense develop-ment to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This develop-ment has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportionas industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportionthe bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the back-ground every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of along course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of pro-duction and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a cor-responding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway ofthe feudal nobility, it became an armed and self-governing association in themedieval commune;4 here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany),there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in theperiod of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolutemonarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the


great monarchies in general—the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishmentof modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the mod-ern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern stateis but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history.The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to

all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the mot-ley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no otherbond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash pay-ment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chival-rous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotisticalcalculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in placeof the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled byreligious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, bru-tal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto hon-ored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, thelawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, andhas reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal displayof vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found itsfitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first toshow what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders farsurpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it hasconducted expeditions that put in the shade all former migrations of nationsand crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instru-ments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with themthe whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of productionin unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for allearlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninter-rupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agita-tion distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozenrelations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at lastcompelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relationswith his kind.


The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases thebourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given acosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. Tothe great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of indus-try the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national indus-tries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged bynew industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for allcivilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw mate-rial, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose prod-ucts are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. Inplace of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find newwants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we haveintercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And asin material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations ofindividual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and nar-row-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerousnational and local literatures there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of produc-tion, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations,even the most barbarian, into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodi-ties are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, withwhich it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capit-ulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois modeof production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into theirmidst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world afterits own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It hascreated enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as com-pared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the popula-tion from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependenton the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries depend-ent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the Easton the West.

More and more the bourgeoisie keeps doing away with the scattered stateof the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglom-erated population, centralized means of production, and has concentratedproperty in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political


centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with sepa-rate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumpedtogether into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one nationalclass interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has createdmore massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding gen-erations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, applicationof chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electrictelegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers,whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had evena presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of sociallabor?

We see then that the means of production and of exchange, which servedas the foundation for the growth of the bourgeoisie, were generated in feudalsociety. At a certain stage in the development of these means of productionand of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced andexchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing indus-try, in a word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatiblewith the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters.They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social andpolitical constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway ofthe bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeoissociety with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a soci-ety that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange,is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the his-tory of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern pro-ductive forces against modern conditions of production, against the propertyrelations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of itsrule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodicalreturn put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time morethreateningly. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, butalso of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. Inthese crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would haveseemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly findsitself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine,a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of sub-sistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because


there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too muchindustry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of soci-ety no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeoisproperty; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions,by which they are fettered, and no sooner do they overcome these fetters thanthey bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existenceof bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow tocomprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get overthese crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of produc-tive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the morethorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way formore extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the meanswhereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the groundare now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death toitself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield thoseweapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the sameproportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a classof laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work onlyso long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell them-selves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, andare consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluc-tuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, thework of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently,all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, andit is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack,that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman isrestricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for hismaintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a com-modity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In pro-portion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wagedecreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division oflabor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases,whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exactedin a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal mas-ter into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded


into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial armythey are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and ser-geants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeoisstate; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker,and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The moreopenly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty,the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, inother words, the more modern industry develops, the more is the labor of mensuperseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer anydistinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor,more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner has the laborer received his wages in cash, for the momentescaping exploitation by the manufacturer, than he is set upon by the otherportions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeep-ers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—allthese sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive cap-ital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, andis swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because theirspecialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thusthe proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birthbegins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on byindividual laborers, then by the work people of a factory, then by the opera-tives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directlyexploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditionsof production, but against the instruments of production themselves; theydestroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smash machineryto pieces, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanishedstatus of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over thewhole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere theyunite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of theirown active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in orderto attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat inmotion, and is moreover still able to do so for a time. At this stage, therefore,the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies,the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bour-geois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concen-


trated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victoryfor the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases innumber; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and itfeels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within theranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machin-ery obliterates all distinctions of labor and nearly everywhere reduces wagesto the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and theresulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluc-tuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly devel-oping, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions betweenindividual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the char-acter of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to formcombinations (trade unions) against the bourgeoisie; they club together inorder to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations inorder to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and therethe contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The realfruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expand-ing union of the workers. This union is furthered by the improved means ofcommunication which are created by modern industry, and which place theworkers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this con-tact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the samecharacter, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggleis a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Mid-dle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern pro-letarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into apolitical party, is continually being upset again by the competition betweenthe workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by tak-ing advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hourbill in England was carried.

Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further thecourse of development of the proletariat in many ways. The bourgeoisie findsitself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, withthose portions of the bourgeoisie itself whose interests have become antago-nistic to the progress of industry; at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreigncountries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat,to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie


itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political andgeneral education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons forfighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are,by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at leastthreatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariatwith fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the processof dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole rangeof old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small sectionof the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the classthat holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a sec-tion of the nobility went over the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bour-geoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bour-geois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehendingtheoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the pro-letariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finallydisappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special andessential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the arti-san, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinc-tion their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not rev-olutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to rollback the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so onlyin view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend nottheir present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint toadopt that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class,” the social scum (Lumpenproletariat), that passivelyrotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there,be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life,however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

The social conditions of the old society no longer exist for the proletariat.The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children hasno longer anything in common with bourgeois family relations; modern indus-trial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, inAmerica as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character.Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind whichlurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.


All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify theiralready acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions ofappropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productiveforces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropri-ation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. Theyhave nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroyall previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in theinterest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, inde-pendent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immensemajority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir,cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official soci-ety being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat withthe bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each countrymust, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the prole-tariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing soci-ety, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and wherethe violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway ofthe proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen,on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppressa class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least,continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised him-self to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under theyoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modernlaborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinksdeeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. Hebecomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population andwealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longerto be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence uponsociety as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent toassure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help let-ting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed byhim. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its exis-tence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence and sway of the bourgeois class, isthe formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor.


Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advanceof industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isola-tion of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, dueto association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from underits feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropri-ates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its owngrave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

NOTES

1. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of socialproduction and employers of wage-labor; by proletariat, the class of modern wage-labor-ers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their laborpower in order to live.

2. That is, all written history. In 1837, the pre-history of society, the social organiza-tion existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then Haxthausen[August von, 1792–1866] discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer [GeorgLudwig von] proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started inhistory, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the prim-itive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this prim-itive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s [Lewis H.,1818–1881] crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe.With the dissolution of these primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated intoseparate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of disso-lution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

3. Guild-master, that is a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.4. “Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they

had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and politicalrights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economic development of the bour-geoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France.

“MONEY AND ALIENATED MAN” (1844)

In this article Marx examines how, under capitalism, money has becomethe new master tool, the tool that determines the organization and use ofall other tools. As such, money (capital) becomes the Director General ofour human species life. It mediates our life not only with all other humansbut also with nature. In so doing, money becomes a fetish. We worship itas the most powerful power in our life.


In comparing money with precious metals, as well as in the discussionof the costs of production as the only factor in determining value, Mill

makes the mistake—generally like Ricardo’s school—of giving the abstract lawwithout the variation and continuous suspension by which it comes into being.If it is an independent law, for example, that the costs of production ultimately—or rather with the periodic and accidental coincidence of supply and demand—determine price (value), it is equally an independent law that this relationshipdoes not hold and that value and production costs have no necessary rela-tionship. Indeed, supply and demand coincide only momentarily because ofprevious fluctuations of supply and demand, because of the discrepancy ofcosts and exchange value, just as this fluctuation and discrepancy in turn suc-ceed the momentary coincidence of supply and demand. This actual process,in which this law is only an abstract, accidental, and one-sided factor, becomessomething accidental, something unessential with the modern economists.Why? Since they reduce the economic order to precise and exact formulas,the basic formula, abstractly expressed, would have to be: In the economicorder lawfulness is determined by its opposite, lawlessness. The real law ofthe economic order is contingency from which we scientists arbitrarily stabi-lize some aspects in the form of laws.

In designating money as the medium of exchange, Mill puts the matter verywell and succinctly in a single concept. The essence of money is not primarilythat it externalizes property, but that the mediating activity or process—thehuman and social act in which man’s products reciprocally complement oneanother—becomes alienated and takes on the quality of a material thing, money,external to man. By externalizing this mediating activity, man is active only ashe is lost and dehumanized. The very relationship of things and the human deal-ings with them become an operation beyond and above man. Through this alienmediation man regards his will, his activity, and his relationships to others as apower independent of himself and of them—instead of man himself being themediator for man. His slavery thus reaches a climax. It is clear that this medi-ator becomes an actual god, for the mediator is the actual power over that whichhe mediates to me. His worship becomes an end in itself. Apart from thismediation, objects lose their value. They have value only insofar as they rep-resent it while originally it appeared that the mediation would have value onlyinsofar as it represents objects. This inversion of the original relationship is nec-essary. The mediation, therefore, is the lost, alienated essence of private prop-erty, exteriorated and externalized private property, just as it is the externalizedexchange of human production with human production, the externalizedspecies—activity of man. All qualities involved in this activity are transmitted

“Money and Alienated Man” (1844) 155

to the mediator. Man as separated from this mediator thus becomes so muchthe poorer as the mediator becomes richer.

Christ originally represents: (1) man before God; (2) God for man; (3) manfor man.

Likewise, money originally represents by its very concept: (1) private prop-erty for private property; (2) society for private property; (3) private propertyfor society.

But Christ is God externalized, externalized man. God has value only inso-far as he represents Christ; man has value only insofar as he represents Christ.It is the same with money.

Why must private property end up in money? Because man as a social beingmust resort to exchange and because exchange—under the presupposition ofprivate property—must end up in value. The mediating process of man mak-ing exchanges is no social, no human process, no human relationship; rather,it is the abstract relationship of private property to private property, and thisabstract relationship is the value whose actual existence as value is primarilymoney. Because men making exchanges do not relate to one another as men,things lose the significance of being human and personal property. The socialrelationship of private property to private property is a relationship in whichprivate property has alienated itself. The reflexive existence of this relation-ship, money, is thus the externalization of private property, an abstractionfrom its specific and personal nature.

Despite all its cleverness, the modern economic order in opposition to themonetary system cannot achieve a decisive victory. The crude economic super-stitions of people and their governments hold on to the perceptible, palpable,and observable moneybag and believe in the absolute value of precious metalsand their possession as the only real form of wealth. The enlightened andknowledgeable economist comes along and proves to them that money is acommodity like any other and that its value, like that of any other commod-ity, depends on the relationship of the costs of production to demand (com-petition) and supply, and to the quantity or competition of other commodi-ties. The correct reply to this economist is that the actual value of things, afterall, is their exchange value, and the exchange value resides in money, just asmoney exists in precious metals. Money, therefore, is the true value of thingsand hence the most desirable thing. The economist’s doctrines yield the samewisdom, except that he can abstractly recognize the existence of money in allforms of commodities and not believe in the exchange value of its officialmetallic existence. The metallic existence of money is only the official sensu-ous expression of the very soul of money existing in all branches of produc-tion and in all operations of civil society.


The modern economists, in opposition to the monetary system, havegrasped money in its abstraction and generality and are enlightened about thesensuous superstition which believes that money exists only in precious met-als. They substitute refined superstition for this crude one. But since bothhave a single root, the enlightened form of the superstition does not entirelyreplace the crude sensuous form because it does not deal with its essence butonly with the particular form of its essence.—The personal existence of moneyas money—and not only as the inner, implicitly existing, and hidden rela-tionship of commodities to one another in respect to their conversion and sta-tus—this existence more corresponds to the essence of money, the moreabstract it is and the less natural relationship it has to other commodities. Themore it appears as a product and yet again as something not produced by man,the less is its element of existence something produced by nature. The more itis produced by man or produced in economics, the greater is the inverted rela-tionship of its value as money to the exchange value or to the monetary valueof the material in which it exists. Hence paper money and paper substitutes formoney such as bills of exchange, checks, promissory notes, etc., constitute themore complete existence of money as money and a necessary phase in the pro-gressive development in the monetary system. In the credit system, fullyexpressed in banking, it appears as if the power of an alien, material force isbroken, the relationships of self-alienation overcome, and man again ishumanly related to man. The followers of Saint-Simon, misled by this appear-ance, consider the development of money, bills of exchange, paper money,paper substitutes for money, credit, and banking as a gradual transcendence ofthe separation of man from things, capital from labor, private property frommoney, and of money from man—a gradual transcendence of the separationof man from man. Hence the organized bank system is their ideal. But this tran-scendence of alienation, this return of man to himself and thus to other menis only apparent. Its self-alienation, its dehumanization is all the more odiousand extreme, insofar as its element is no longer the commodity, metal, or paper,but the moral and social existence, the very inwardness of the human heart; inso-far as it is the highest distrust of man for man and complete alienation, underthe appearance of trust of man for man.

What is the nature of credit? We are here completely disregarding the con-tent of credit which is again money. We thus disregard the content of this trust,wherein a man recognizes another by lending him values—let us assume thathe does not take interest and is no profiteer—and by trusting that his fellowman is a “good” man and not a rascal. By a “good” man the trusting man hereunderstands, like Shylock, the man who can pay. Credit is possible under tworelationships and under two distinct conditions. Take the case where a wealthy


man gives credit to a poor man whom he considers diligent and reliable. Thiskind of credit belongs in the romantic and sentimental part of economics,belongs to its departures, excesses, exceptions, not to its rule. Even if this excep-tion and this romantic possibility are assumed, the life, talent, and activity ofthe poor man guarantee for the rich man the repayment for the money loaned.All social virtues of the poor man, then, the substance of his living and hisvery existence, represent for the rich man the reimbursement of his capital withthe usual interest. The death of the poor man is the worst possibility for thecreditor. It is the death of his capital and the interest as well. Consider theignominy in the evaluation of a man in terms of money as it takes place in thecredit system. It is understood that in addition to moral guarantees the cred-itor also has the guarantee of judicial force and more or less real guarantees forhis man. If the debtor is himself affluent, credit becomes merely a facilitatingmedium of exchange, and money itself acquires an ideal form. Credit is the eco-nomic judgment of man’s morality. In credit, man himself instead of metal andpaper has become the medium of exchange, but not as man, but rather as theexistence of capital and interest. The medium of exchange is thus returned fromits material form to man, but only because man has been externalized and hashimself become a material form. Within the credit relationship, money is nottranscended in man, but man is transformed into money, and money is incor-porated in him. Human individuality and human morality have become an arti-cle of trade and the material in which money exists. Instead of money andpaper, my very personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue andreputation is the matter and the substance of the monetary spirit. Credit nolonger reduces monetary value to money, but to human flesh and the humanheart. All the progress and inconsequence of a false system thus constitute theextreme regression and consequence of ignominy.

The nature of the credit system as alienated from man is confirmed in thefollowing manner under the appearance of the economic recognition of man:(1) The contrast between the capitalist and the laborer—between the big andthe small capitalist—becomes even greater as credit is given only to the onewho already has and is a new chance for accumulation for the wealthy, or asthe poor person sees his entire existence confirmed or denied, and completelydependent upon the accidental caprice and judgment of the wealthy man. (2)Mutual dissimulation, hypocrisy, and sanctimoniousness are carried to thepoint that a moral judgment is added to the simple statement that a man with-out credit is poor, a judgment that he is untrustworthy and unworthy of recog-nition, a social pariah and bad man. On a top of suffering from his destitu-tion the poor man suffers from having to make a debasing plea to the rich forcredit. (3) With this completely ideal existence of money, man must counter-


feit his own person and must obtain credit by sneaking and lying. The creditrelationship—for the creditor as well as for the debtor—becomes an object oftrade, an object of mutual betrayal and misuse. Here mistrust is brilliantlyapparent as the basis of economic trust; in the distrustful weighing as towhether credit should or should not be given; in the spying into the secretsof the private life of the one seeking credit; in the revealing of a rival’s tem-porary misfortunes in order to wreck him by shaking his credit, etc.; the entiresystem of bankruptcy, pseudo-enterprises, etc. . . . In the credit system on thestate level the state occupies completely the same position as shown above forman . . . The game with governmental bonds shows how far the state hasbecome the plaything of men of commerce.

(4) The credit system is perfected in banking. The creation of the banker’sposition, state regulation of banking, concentration of fortunes in thesehands—this economic areopagus of the nation—is the lauded perfection of themonetary system. As the moral recognition of a man and the confidence in thestate has the form of credit in the credit system, the secret involved in the decep-tion of that moral recognition, the amoral ignominy of that morality as wellas the sanctimoniousness and egoism in the confidence in the state becomeapparent—and all this reveals itself for what it actually is.

The exchange of human activity within production itself as well as theexchange of human products with one another is equivalent to the generic activ-ity and generic spirit whose actual, conscious, and authentic existence is socialactivity and social satisfaction. As human nature is the true common life [Gemein-wesen] of man, men through the activation of their nature create and producea human common life, a social essence which is no abstractly universal poweropposed to the single individual, but is the essence or nature of every singleindividual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth.Authentic common life arises not through reflection; rather it comes about fromthe need and egoism of individuals, that is, immediately from the activation oftheir very existence. It is not up to man whether this common life exists ornot. However, so long as man does not recognize himself as man and does notorganize the world humanly, this common life appears in the form of alienation,because its subject, man, is a being alienated from itself. Men as actual, living,particular individuals, not in an abstraction, constitute this common life. It is,therefore, what men are. To say that man alienates himself is the same as say-ing that the society of this alienated man is the caricature of his actual commonlife, of his true generic life. His activity, therefore, appears as torment, his owncreation as a force alien to him, his wealth as poverty, the essential bond con-necting him with other men as something unessential so that the separationfrom other men appears as his true existence. His life appears as the sacrifice


of his life, the realization of his nature as the diminution of his life, his pro-duction as the production of his destruction, his power over the object as thepower of the object over him; the master of his creation appears as its slave.

Political economy understands the common life of man, the self-activatinghuman essence and mutual redintegration toward generic and truly human life,in the form of exchange and commerce. Society, says Destutt de Tracy, is a seriesof multilateral exchanges. It is constituted by this movement of multilateralintegration. Society, says Adam Smith, is a commercial enterprise. Each of itsmembers is a merchant. It is evident that political economy establishes an alien-ated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and definitive humanform.

Economics—like the actual process itself—proceeds from the relationshipof man to man and from the relationship of one property owner to another. Letus presuppose man as property owner, that is, as exclusive possessor who main-tains his personality and distinguishes himself from other men and relateshimself to them through this exclusive possession. Private property is his per-sonal existence, his distinguishing and hence essential existence. The loss or relin-quishing of private property, then, is an externalization of man as well as of pri-vate property. We are concerned here only with the latter. When I yield myprivate property to another person, it ceases being mine. It becomes some-thing independent of me and outside my sphere, something external to me. Iexternalize my private property. So far as I am concerned, it is externalized pri-vate property. I see it only as something generally externalized; I only transcendmy personal relationship to it; and I return it to the elemental forces of naturewhen I externalize it only in relation to myself. It only becomes externalizedprivate property as it ceases being my private property without ceasing to beprivate property in general, that is, when it acquires the same relationship toanother man outside of me, as it had to me—in a word, when it becomes theprivate property of another man. Apart from the situation of force, what causesme to externalize my private property to another person? Economics answerscorrectly: need and want. The other person is also a property owner, but ofanother object which I lack and which I neither can nor want to be without,an object which to me seems to be something needed for the redintegration ofmy existence and the realization of my nature.

The bond relating the two property owners to each other is the specificnature of the object. The fact that either property owner desires and wants objectsmakes him aware that he has another essential relationship to objects outsideof property and that he is not the particular being he takes himself to be butrather a total being whose wants have a relationship of inner property to theproducts of the labor of the other person. For the need of an object is the most


evident and irrefutable proof that the object belongs to my nature and that theexistence of the object for me and its property are the property appropriate tomy essence. Both owners are thus impelled to relinquish their property, but insuch a way that at the same time they reaffirm that property; or they are impelledto relinquish that property within the relationship of private property. Each thusexternalizes a part of his property in the other person.

The social relationship of both owners is thus the mutuality of externaliza-tion, the relationship of externalization on both sides—or externalization as therelationship of both owners—while in simple private property externalizationtakes place only one-sidedly, in relationship to itself.

Exchange or barter, therefore, is the social, generic act, the common essence,the social intercourse and integration of man within private property, and theexternal, the externalized generic act. For that very reason it appears as barter.And hence it is likewise the opposite of the social relationship.

Through the mutual externalization or alienation of private property, pri-vate property itself has been determined as externalized private property. Firstof all it has ceased being the product of labor and being the exclusive, dis-tinctive personality of its owner because the owner has externalized it; it hasbeen removed from the owner whose product it was and has acquired a per-sonal significance for the person who did not produce it. It has lost its per-sonal significance for the owner. In the second place it has been related to andequated with another private property. A private property of a different naturehas taken its place, just as it itself takes the position of a private property of adifferent nature. On both sides, then, private property appears as a represen-tative of private property of a different nature, as the equivalence of anothernatural product. Both sides are so related that each represents the existence ofthe other and they mutually serve as substitutes for themselves and the other.The existence of private property as such has thus become a substitute, anequivalent. Instead of its immediate self-unity it exists only in relationship tosomething else. As an equivalent its existence is no longer something peculiarlyappropriate to it. It has become value and immediately exchange value. Its exis-tence as value is a determination of itself, different from its immediate existence,outside of its specific nature, and externalized—only a relative existence.

It will be shown elsewhere how this value is more precisely determinedand how it becomes price.

The relationship of exchange being presupposed, labor immediatelybecomes wage-labor. This relationship of alienated labor reaches its apex onlyby the fact (1) that on the one side wage-labor, the product of the laborer, standsin no immediate relationship to his need and to his status but is rather deter-mined in both directions through social combinations alien to the laborer; (2)


that the buyer of the product is not himself productive but exchanges whathas been produced by others. In the crude form of externalized private prop-erty, barter, each of the two private owners produces what his need, his incli-nation, and the existing raw material induces him to produce. They exchangeonly the surplus of their production. To be sure, labor was for each one theimmediate source of his subsistence; at the same time, however, it was also theconfirmation of his individual existence. Through exchange, his labor has partlybecome his source of income. The purpose and existence of labor have changed.The product is created as value, exchange value, and an equivalent and no longerbecause of its immediate personal relationship to the producer. The more var-ied production becomes—in other words, the more varied the needs becomeon the one hand and the more one-sided the producer’s output becomes onthe other—the more does his labor fall into the category of wage-labor, untilit is eventually nothing but wage-labor and until it becomes entirely inciden-tal and unessential whether the producer immediately enjoys and needs hisproduct and whether the activity, the action of labor itself, is his self-satisfac-tion and the realization of his natural dispositions and spiritual aims.

The following elements are contained in wage-labor: (1) the chance rela-tionship and alienation of labor from the laboring subject; (2) the chance rela-tionship and alienation of labor from its object; (3) the determination of thelaborer through social needs which are an alien compulsion to him, a com-pulsion to which he submits out of egoistic need and distress—these socialneeds are merely a source of providing the necessities of life for him, just ashe is merely a slave for them; (4) the maintenance of his individual existenceappears to the worker as the goal of his activity and his real action is only ameans; he lives to acquire the means of living.

The greater and the more articulated the social power is within the rela-tionship of private property, the more egoistic and asocial man becomes, themore he becomes alienated from his own nature.

Just as the mutual exchange of products of human activity appears as trad-ing and bargaining, so does the mutual redintegration and exchange of theactivity itself appear as the division of labor making man as far as possible anabstract being, an automaton, and transforming him into a spiritual and phys-ical monster.

Precisely the unity of human labor is regarded as being its division becauseits social nature comes into being only as its opposite, in the form of alien-ation. The division of labor increases with civilization.

Within the presupposition of the division of labor, the product and mate-rial of private property gradually acquire for the individual the significance of


an equivalent. He no longer exchanges his surplus, and he can become indif-ferent to the object of his production. He no longer immediately exchanges hisproduct for the product he needs. The equivalent becomes an equivalent inmoney which is the immediate result of wage-labor and the medium ofexchange. (See above.)

The complete domination of the alienated object over man is evident inmoney and the complete disregard of the nature of the material, the specificnature of private property as well as the personality of the proprietor.

What formerly was the domination of one person over another has nowbecome the general domination of the thing over the person, the dominationof the product over the producer. Just as the determination of the external-ization of private property lay in the equivalent and in value, so is money thesensuous, self-objectified existence of this externalization.

It is clear that economics can grasp this entire development only as a fac-tum and as the offspring of chance need.

The separation of labor from itself = separation of laborer from capitalist =separation of labor from capital whose original form can be divided into realproperty and chattel property . . . The original determination of private propertyis monopoly; as soon as it acquires a political constitution, it is that of monop-oly. Monopoly perfected is competition.—The economist distinguishes pro-duction and consumption, and as media of both he refers to exchange or distri-bution. The separation of production from consumption, and of activity frommind in various individuals and within the same individual is the separation oflabor from its object and from itself as one mind. Distribution is the self-activepower of private property.—The mutual separation of labor, capital, and realproperty as well as the separation of labor from labor, of capital from capital,of real property from real property, and finally the separation of labor fromwages, of capital from profit, of profit from interest, and of real property fromrent makes self-alienation appear in the form of self-alienation as well as in theform of mutual alienation.

“CAPITAL,” BOOK ONE (EXTRACT) (1867)

These brief extracts from Marx’s masterpiece show that he continuedthroughout his mature years to look upon religion as a mere reflex of thereal world, an expression of human alienation reflecting an objectivelyalienated world, a world that was accepted and baptized by the church.

Capital, Book One (Extract) (1867) 163

. . .The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for asociety based upon the production of commodities, in which the pro-

ducers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating theirproducts as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual pri-vate labor to the standard of homogeneous human labor—for such a society,Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeoisdevelopments, Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that theconversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion ofmen into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, how-ever, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearerand nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist inthe ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Inter-mundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organ-isms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simpleand transparent. But they are founded either on the immature developmentof man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that uniteshim with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct rela-tions of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development ofthe productive power of labor has not risen beyond a low stage, and when,therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between manand man, and between man and nature, are correspondingly narrow. This nar-rowness is reflected in the ancient worship of nature, and in the other elementsof the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case,only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer toman none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to hisfellowmen and to nature.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material pro-duction, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production byfreely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance witha settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneousproduct of a long and painful process of development.

Political Economy has indeed analyzed, however incompletely, value andits magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it hasnever once asked the question why labor is represented by the value of its prod-uct and labor-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bearstamped upon them in unmistakable letters, that they belong to a state ofsociety, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead


of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect tobe as much a self-evident necessity imposed by nature as productive labor itself.Hence, forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form are treatedby the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treatedpre-Christian religions. . . .

. . . A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inven-tions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there isno such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology,i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serveas instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of theproductive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all socialorganization, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be eas-ier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural historyin this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology disclosesman’s mode of dealing with nature, the process of production by which he sus-tains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his socialrelations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every historyof religion even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical.It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of themisty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is to develop from the actualrelations of life the corresponding celestialized forms of those relations. Thelatter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific, one.The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialismthat excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract andideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond thebounds of their own speciality.

Capital, Book One (Extract) (1867) 165

Many social scientists see in religion an indispensable instrumentby which we humans make our sufferings more sufferable. Religion not only tells usof a different place where things will be better—heaven, paradise, nirvana—it sup-plies us with a set of ritual practices by which to express, both individually and col-lectively, our sorrows. And in expressing our sorrow—in saying our prayers, in doingour ritual washing, in imposing our acts of ascetic self-denial—we give order andcoherence to chaotic emotions that result from suffering and would otherwise over-whelm us. For many social scientists, religion is what helps us manage the evils thatassault our lives and, individually and as a group, help us get on with our lives.

Karl Marx sees in religion a more active moral agency. Religion is for him less adevice for pacifying suffering than it is a protest against that suffering. “Religion,”Marx says, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world.”1

Those who suffer seek not only solace but change—an end to their suffering, a wayout! And Marx is quite ready to give religion a place in all of that. “Religious suffer-ing,” he says, “is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and aprotest against real suffering.”2 Why then does Marx finally turn away from reli-gion, proclaiming it a useless tool? Because “the abolition of religion as the illusoryhappiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”3

167

P A R T IV

The Criticism of Religion

Initially, Marx gives religion a far more active, protest role, but then he takes itaway. For Marx, religion must be seen for what it is—”an inverted consciousness.”4

Religion sees the real world, feels the real world, sorrows over the real world, butdoes all this upside down. Religion “descends from heaven to earth.”5 And that dis-empowers protest, because “the more of himself man gives to God the less he hasleft in himself.”6 For Marx, the task is to keep consciousness tightly and criticallyfocused upon this world, and then change it. “The philosophers,” he complains,“have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”7

What Marx criticizes is the kind of philosophy and the kind of theology he sawbeing practiced everywhere by academic elites. In the face of suffering what thesecomfortable intellectuals do is transform concrete injustices, concrete evils, into aprofound understanding of Evil (with a capital “E”). The sufferings we experience ineveryday life, especially if we lack power and protection, are translated into “theProblem of Evil,” something that requires deep reflection and yields a self chastenedby tragedy, and at the same moment elevated into an aristocracy of soul. Turninghis back on such elitist self-indulgence, Marx insists:

To arrive at man in the flesh, one does not set out from what men say, imag-ine, or conceive, nor from man as he is described, thought about, imagined,or conceived. Rather one sets out from real, active men and their actual life-process. . . . [Then] morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideologyand their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer seem to be inde-pendent. Rather, men who develop their material production and their mate-rial relationships alter their thinking and the products of their thinking alongwith their real existence. Consciousness does not determine life, but life deter-mines consciousness.8

Still, if consciousness was wholly determined by life circumstances, then thesuffering of the oppressed would be determined by that negative experience, andprotest would disappear into confession and self-blame. Of course that can hap-pen, and has happened! But time and again the poor and the oppressed have usedreligion not only to survive but to resist, and eventually to rebel. Religion in thehands of those who suffer the injustices of society has been and is being used tochallenge and to change the world. I will not repeat here what I pointed to in theintroduction concerning the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s. Much of his-tory—yes, even that memory of the past written by those who dominated theirrespective times—is full of subversive memories that became movements and ush-ered in a different future.

Take patriarchal religion as an example. Women have been marginalized almosteverywhere in world religions. They have not simply been excluded from institutionsof religious hierarchy, but their voices have been taken away from them by sacred

168 Part IV: The Criticism of Religion

texts, where women become not the speaking “I” or the spoken to “You” but theabsent “them” of an intra-male discourse. Yet, in face of this religiously sanctionedoppression women have used religion both to express their suffering and to changethe concrete circumstances of that suffering. Both in Buddhism and in Christianity,for example, women fought for and won the right to become fully ordained nuns,living under their own rule. In cultures in which women faced adult lives of mar-riages arranged by fathers for purposes of acquiring land or cementing alliances–-and this has been the way of marriage in almost all past cultures—the opportunityto choose a celibate religious life evidenced strong resistance and effectivelychanged life options for women.

The central critique of Marx against religion is a critique of how elites haveused and still use their religion—to give themselves, for example, a sense of legiti-macy for their privilege or “meaning” in the face of personal tragedy. What I thinkMarx missed is that religious symbols (ideas) and ritual practices can have not onlydifferent but contradictory meanings for oppressors and the oppressed. In slavesongs about what will happen in heaven, for example, slave masters heard slavessurrendering to their conditions here on earth. It gave them a wholly misplacedsense of security, which became all too evident when heaven descended suddenlyto earth in the thunder of slave revolts.

Toward the end of his life, Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, came back to theissue of the apocalyptic hope of a radical transformation. In that religious cry ofprotest Marx and Engels heard the voice of the sufferers of social injustice probingthe future for an exodus, a different way forward. Nevertheless, to this more posi-tive assessment of religion Marx might well respond: “Yes, but what is it that reli-gion has mostly done, and mostly still does?”

The essays that comprise this section of the book bring us full circle, back tothe issues of consciousness and the material world with which we started. Onceagain, Marx is in dialogue with Hegel and Feuerbach. Once again, he probes therole of ideas, whether active or passive, whether merely a reflection of the alreadyof the given world and its institutions and structures or, at least occasionally, nam-ing a “not yet” hidden in that already. Marx is clear on the position he takes:

Man can be distinguished from the animal by consciousness, religion, or any-thing else you please. He begins to distinguish himself from the animal themoment he begins to produce his means of subsistence. . . . [The] mode of pro-duction must not be viewed simply as reproduction of the physical existenceof individuals. Rather it is a definite form of their activity, a definite way ofexpressing their life, a definite mode of life. As individuals express their life, sothey are. What they are, therefore, coincides with what they produce, with whatthey produce and how they produce. The nature of individuals thus dependson the material conditions which determine their production.9

Part IV: Introduction 169

Many of us find truth in that statement, not the whole truth, but an importanttruth. Like other animals, we humans must in every moment continue to gain “sub-sistence,” gain our life, from the larger material world. And we do this in a highlydynamic but also profoundly intimate way, by the dialogue with the encompassingmaterial world we establish through our human work. Perhaps religion in thetwenty-first century will become a site of critical analysis concerning the newglobal organization of human labor, a site of active organizing to take up our placeon Earth in a more grateful and responsible way.

But if religion does not do that, Karl Marx would not be surprised. Just ashuman work under the conditions of estranged labor is thought to be the means ofindividual survival, so hope under the conditions of religious estrangement is oftenconceived of in terms of individual escape. Both reflect human consciousness alien-ated from our active species being; and both are wrong.

NOTES

1. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 171.2. Ibid.3. Ibid.4. Ibid.5. “German Ideology—Ideology in General,” p. 100.6. “Estranged Labor,” p. 119.7. “Concerning Feuerbach,” p. 184.8. “German Ideology—Ideology in General,” p. 100.9. Ibid, pp. 95–96.

“CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT” (1844)

In the following brief but powerful three essays we find, in a nutshell, thecomplaint Marx brings against religion. It is a complaint that begins in apositive and even generous way. For Marx, religion is “the self-esteem ofman.”1 And given the oppressive conditions of the masses, that self-esteem expresses itself as the cry of “the heart of a heartless world andthe soul of soulless conditions.”2 Religion is a protest in the face of suffer-ing. But for Marx this remains the expression of a consciousness that isinverted; it is the self-esteem of “man who has either not won through tohimself or has already lost himself again.”3 Rather than lead to struggleand change, religion makes suffering sufferable; it induces resignationbefore a “higher power” (god, karma, whatever).


For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed,and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.

The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly ora-tio pro aris et focis [plea on behalf of hearth and home] has been refuted. Man,who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven,where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mereappearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his truereality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion doesnot make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem ofman who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost him-self again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man isthe world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion,which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, itslogic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moralsanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation andjustification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the humanessence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is there-fore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suf-fering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressedcreature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. Itis the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is thedemand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions abouttheir condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. Thecriticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears ofwhich religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order thatman shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but sothat he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism ofreligion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality likea man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he willmove around himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sunwhich revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is therefore the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, toestablish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is inthe service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once theholy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus the criticism of

“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844) 171

heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticismof law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

The following exposition—a contribution to this undertaking—concernsitself not directly with the original but with a copy, with the German philoso-phy of the state and of law. The only reason for this is that it is concerned withGermany.

If we were to begin with the German status quo itself, the result—even ifwe were to do it in the only appropriate way, i.e. negatively—would still bean anachronism. Even the negation of our present political situation is a dustyfact in the historical junk room of modern nations. If I negate powdered wigs,I am still left with unpowdered wigs. If I negate the situation in Germany in1843, then according to the French calendar I have barely reached 1789,much less the vital center of our present age.

Indeed, German history prides itself on having traveled a road which noother nation in the whole of history has ever traveled before, or ever willagain. We have shared the restorations of modern nations without ever hav-ing shared their revolutions. We have been restored firstly because othernations dared to make revolutions and secondly because other nations sufferedcounter-revolutions: on the one hand, because our masters were afraid, andon the other, because they were not afraid. With our shepherds to the fore,we only once kept company with freedom, on the day of its interment.

One school of thought that legitimizes the infamy of today with the infamyof yesterday, a school that stigmatizes every cry of the serf against the knoutas mere rebelliousness once the knout has aged a little and acquired a hered-itary significance and a history, a school to which history shows nothing butits a posteriori, as did the God of Israel to his servant Moses, the historical schoolof law—this school would have invented German history were it not itself aninvention of that history. A Shylock, but a cringing Shylock, that swears by itsbond, its historical bond, its Christian-Germanic bond, for every pound of fleshcut from the heart of the people.

On the other hand, good-natured enthusiasts, German chauvinists by tem-perament and free-thinking liberals by reflection, seek the history of our free-dom beyond our history, in the primeval Teutonic forests. But how does thehistory of our freedom differ from that of the wild boar, if it is only to be foundin the forests? And besides, everyone knows that what is shouted into a for-est is echoed back again. So peace to the primeval Teutonic forests!

But war on conditions in Germany! By all means! They are below the levelof history, they are beneath all criticism, but they remain an object of criticism,in the same way as the criminal who is beneath the level of humanity remainsan object for the executioner. In its struggle against them criticism is not a pas-


sion of the head but the head of passion. It is not a scalpel but a weapon. Itsobject is its enemy, which it aims not to refute but to destroy. For the spirit ofthese conditions is already refuted. In themselves they are not worthy of thought:rather, they are existences as despicable as they are despised. Criticism itselfdoes not require any further understanding of this object, for it is already clearabout it. Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means. The essen-tial force that moves it is indignation and its essential task is denunciation.

It must set out to depict the stifling pressure which all the different spheresof society exercise on one another, the universal but apathetic ill-feeling andthe narrowness of vision that both acknowledges and misconstrues itself—allthis contained within the framework of a system of government which livesby conserving all this wretchedness and is itself nothing but wretchedness ingovernment.

What a spectacle! A society infinitely divided into the most diverse raceswhich confront one another with their petty antipathies, their bad consciencesand their brutal mediocrity and which, precisely because of their ambivalentand suspicious attitude towards one another, are dealt with by their masterswithout distinction, although with different formalities, as if their existence hadbeen granted to them on licence. And they are even forced to recognize andacknowledge the fact that they are dominated, ruled, and possessed as a privi-lege from heaven! On the other hand there are the rulers themselves, whosegreatness is in inverse proportion to their numbers!

The criticism which deals with these facts is involved in a hand-to-handfight, and in such fights it does not matter what the opponent’s rank is, orwhether he is noble or interesting: what matters is to hit him. The importantthing is not to permit the German a single moment of self-deception or res-ignation. The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creat-ing an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it pub-lic. Each sphere of German society must be depicted as the partie honteuse ofthat society and these petrified conditions must be made to dance by havingtheir own tune sung to them! The people must be put in terror of themselvesin order to give them courage. In this way a pressing need of the Germannation will be fulfilled, and the needs of nations are themselves the ultimatecauses of their satisfaction.

And even for modern nations this struggle against the restricted nature ofthe German status quo is not without interest, for the German status quo is theundisguised consummation of the ancient régime and the ancien régime is the hid-den defect of the modern state. The struggle against the German political pres-ent is the struggle against the past of modern nations, which continue to beharassed by reminiscences of this past. It is instructive for them to see the


ancien régime, which in their countries has experienced its tragedy, play its comicrole as a German phantom. Its history was tragic as long as it was the pre-exist-ing power in the world and freedom a personal whim—in a word, as long asit believed, and had to believe, in its own privileges. As long as the ancienrégime, as an established world order, was struggling against a world that wasonly just emerging, there was a world-historical error on its side but not a per-sonal one. Its downfall was therefore tragic.

The present German regime, on the other hand—an anachronism, a fla-grant contradiction of universally accepted axioms, the futility of the ancienrégime displayed for all the world to see—only imagines that it still believesin itself and asks the world to share in its fantasy. If it believed in its own nature,would it try to hide that nature under the appearance of an alien nature andseek its salvation in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien régime ismerely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thor-ough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to itsgrave. The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods,who already died once of their wounds in Aeschylus’s tragedy PrometheusBound, were forced to die a second death—this time a comic one—in Lucian’sdialogues. Why does history take this course? So that mankind may part hap-pily from its past. We lay claim to this happy historical destiny for the politi-cal powers of Germany.

But as soon as modern socio-political reality itself is subjected to criticism,i.e. as soon as criticism begins to deal with truly human problems, it finds itselfoutside the German status quo, or it would grasp its object at a level below itsobject. For example: the relationship of industry and the world of wealth ingeneral to the political world is one of the main problems of the modern age.In which form does this problem begin to preoccupy the Germans? In the formof protective tariffs, of a system of prohibitions of national economy. German chau-vinism has made the passage from men to matter, and one fine morning ourcotton barons and iron heroes woke to find themselves transformed into patri-ots. In Germany, therefore, we are beginning to recognize the sovereignty ofmonopoly within our borders by granting it sovereignty without them. In Ger-many, therefore, we are about to begin at the point where France and Englandare about to conclude. The old and rotten order against which these countriesare theoretically up in arms, and which they continue to bear only as onewould bear chains, is greeted in Germany as the dawn of a beautiful future—a future which scarcely dares to make the transition from cunning theory topitiless practice. In France and England the alternatives are posed: politicaleconomy or the rule of society over wealth, whereas in Germany they are posed:national economy or the rule of private property over nationality. In France and


England, therefore, it is a question of abolishing monopoly, which has pro-gressed to its final consequences; in Germany it is a question of progressingto the final consequences of monopoly. There it is a question of the solution;here it is only a question of the collision. This is a good example of the Ger-man form of modern problems, an example of how our history, like some rawrecruit, has up to now been restricted to repeating hackneyed routines thatbelong to the past of other nations.

So if Germany’s development as a whole were not at a more advanced stagethan Germany’s political development, a German would not be able to partic-ipate in contemporary problems any more than can a Russian. But if the indi-vidual is not confined within the bounds of the nation, still less is the nationas a whole liberated through the liberation of an individual. The Scythians didnot advance one step towards Greek culture because the Greeks numbered aScythian among their philosophers.

Fortunately we Germans are not Scythians.Just as ancient peoples lived their previous history in the imagination, in

mythology, so we Germans have lived our future history in thought, in philos-ophy. We are the philosophical contemporaries of the present without being itshistorical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of Ger-man history. Therefore when we criticize the œuvres posthumes of our ideal his-tory, i.e. philosophy, instead of the œuvres incomplètes of our real history, ourcriticism stands at the center of those problems of which the present age says:That is the question. What for advanced nations is a practical quarrel with mod-ern political conditions is for Germany, where such conditions do not yetexist, a critical quarrel with their reflection in philosophy.

The German philosophy of law and of the state is the only German history whichstands on an equal footing with the official modern present. The German nationmust therefore link its dream history to its present conditions and subject notonly these conditions but also their abstract continuation to criticism. Its futurecannot be restricted either to the direct negation of its real political and juridi-cal conditions or to the direct realization of its ideal political and juridical con-ditions, for the direct negation of its real conditions is already present in its idealconditions and it has almost outlived the direct realization of its ideal condi-tions by watching developments in neighboring nations. The practical politicalparty in Germany is therefore right to demand the negation of philosophy. Whereit goes wrong is in limiting itself to a demand which it does not and cannotachieve. It believes that it can carry out this negation by turning its back onphilosophy and mumbling a few irritable and banal phrases over its shoulderat it. Its approach is so restricted that it does not even look upon philosophyas a part of German reality, or it regards it as beneath German practice and its


associated theories. You demand that we make the real seeds of life our point ofdeparture, but you forget that the real seed of life of the German people has upto now only flourished inside its cranium. In a word: You cannot transcend[aufheben] philosophy without realizing [verwirklichen] it.

The same mistake, but with the factors reversed, was committed by thetheoretical political party, which has its origins in philosophy.

This party saw in the present struggle only the critical struggle of philosophywith the German world and failed to realize that previous philosophy itself belongsto this world and is its complement, even though an ideal complement. It wascritical towards its counterpart, but not towards itself, for it took the presup-positions of philosophy as its point of departure and either took for grantedthe conclusions of that philosophy or passed off demands and conclusionsdrawn from other quarters as direct philosophical demands and conclusions.But this is to ignore the fact that such demands and conclusions—assumingthat they are legitimate—can be achieved only through the negation of previ-ous philosophy, i.e. of philosophy as philosophy. We shall save for later a moredetailed account of this party. Its basic defect can be summed up as follows:It believed that it could realize philosophy without transcending it.

The criticism of the German philosophy of the state and of law, which receivedits most consistent, thorough, and complete formulation from Hegel, is boththese things: it is at once a critical analysis of the modern state and of the real-ity connected with it and a decisive negation of all previous forms of politicaland juridical consciousness in Germany, whose most refined and universal expres-sion, elevated to the level of a science, is precisely the speculative philosophy oflaw. Only Germany could develop the speculative philosophy of law, thisabstract and high-flown thought of the modern state, the reality of whichremains part of another world (even if this other world is only the other sideof the Rhine). Conversely, the German conception of the modern state, whichabstracts from real man, was only possible because and in so far as the mod-ern state itself abstracts from real man or satisfies the whole man in a purelyimaginary way. The Germans have thought in politics what other nations havedone. Germany has been their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and arro-gance of Germany’s thought always kept pace with the one-sided and stuntedcharacter of their reality. So if the status quo of the German political system isan expression of the consummation of the ancien régime, the completion of thethorn in the flesh of the modern state, then the status quo of German politicalthought is an expression of the imperfection of the modern state, the damagedcondition of the flesh itself.

As the determined opponent of the previous form of German political con-sciousness, the criticism of the speculative philosophy of law finds its pro-


gression not within itself but in tasks which can only be solved in one way—through practice [Praxis].

We must then ask ourselves: can Germany attain a practice à la hauteurdes principes, that is to say, a revolution that raises it not only to the official levelof modern nations but to the human level that will be their immediate future?

Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons,and material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory alsobecomes a material force once it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable ofgripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstratesad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things bythe root. But for man the root is man himself. Clear proof of the radicalism ofGerman theory and its practical energy is the fact that it takes as its point ofdeparture a decisive and positive transcendence of religion. The criticism of reli-gion ends with the doctrine that for man the supreme being is man, and thuswith the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is adebased, enslaved, neglected, and contemptible being—conditions that arebest described in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a pro-posed tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you like human beings!

For Germany, theoretical emancipation has a specific practical significanceeven from a historical point of view. For Germany’s revolutionary past, in theform of the Reformation, is also theoretical. Just as it was then the monk, so itis now the philosopher in whose brain the revolution begins.

Luther certainly conquered servitude based on devotion, but only by replac-ing it with servitude based on conviction. He destroyed faith in authority, butonly by restoring the authority of faith. He transformed the priests into lay-men, but only by transforming the laymen into priests. He freed mankind fromexternal religiosity, but only by making religiosity the inner man. He freed thebody from its chains, but only by putting the heart in chains.

But even if Protestantism was not the true solution, it did pose the prob-lem correctly. It was now no longer a question of the struggle of the laymanwith the priest outside himself, but rather of his struggle with his own inner priest,with his priestly nature. And if the Protestant transformation of the Germanlaymen into priests emancipated the lay priests—the princes together withtheir clergy, the privileged and the philistines—the philosophical transforma-tion of the priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people. But just asemancipation did not stop with the princes, so will secularization of propertynot stop with the dispossession of the churches, which was set going above allby hypocritical Prussia. At that time the Peasants’ War, the most radical episodein German history, suffered defeat because of theology. Today, when theologyitself has failed, the most unfree episode in German history, our status quo, will


founder on philosophy. On the eve of the Reformation official Germany wasRome’s most unquestioning vassal. On the eve of its revolution Germany isthe unquestioning vassal of lesser powers than Rome—of Prussia and Austria,of clod-hopping squires and philistines.

But a major difficulty appears to stand in the way of a radical German rev-olution.

The point is that revolutions need a passive element, a material basis. The-ory is realized in a people only in so far as it is a realization of the people’sneeds. But will the enormous gap that exists between the demands of Germanthought and the responses of German reality now correspond to the same gapboth between civil society and the state and civil society and itself? Will thetheoretical needs be directly practical needs? It is not enough that thoughtshould strive to realize itself; reality must itself strive towards thought.

But Germany did not pass through the intermediate stages of politicalemancipation at the same time as modern nations. Even the stages that it hasleft behind in theory it has not yet reached in practice. How is Germany, inone salto mortale, to override not only its own limitations but also those of themodern nations, to override limitations which in point of fact it ought to expe-rience and strive for as liberation from its real limitations? A radical revolu-tion can only be the revolution of radical needs, but the preconditions andseedbeds for such needs appear to be lacking.

Yet, even if Germany has only kept company with the development of themodern nations through the abstract activity of thought, without taking anactive part in the real struggles of this development, it has nevertheless sharedin the sufferings of this development without sharing in its pleasures and itspartial satisfaction. Abstract activity on the one hand corresponds to abstractsuffering on the other. Germany will therefore one day find itself at the levelof European decadence before it has ever reached the level of European eman-cipation. It will be like a fetish-worshipper suffering from the diseases ofChristianity.

If we examine the German governments, we find that as a result of the cir-cumstances of the time, the situation in Germany, the standpoint of Germaneducation, and finally their own happy instincts they are driven to combinethe civilized defects of the modern political world, whose advantages we lack, withthe barbaric defects of the ancien régime, of which we have our full measure. Inthis way Germany must participate more and more, if not in the reason thenat least in the unreason even of those state forms which have progressedbeyond its own status quo. For example, is there any country in the worldwhich shares as naïvely as so-called constitutional Germany all the illusionsof the constitutional state without sharing any of the realities? Or was it just


an accident that the idea of combining the torments of censorship with thetorments of the French September laws, which presuppose freedom of thepress, was the invention of a German government? Just as the gods of allnations could be found in the Roman Pantheon, so the sins of all state formswill be found in the Holy Roman German Empire. That this eclecticism willtake on unheard-of proportions is assured in particular by the politico-aestheticgourmandise of a German king, who proposes to play all the roles of royalty—feudal and bureaucratic, absolute and constitutional, autocratic and demo-cratic—if not in the person of the people then at least in his own person, andif not for the people, then at least for himself. Germany, as a world of its ownembodying all the deficiencies of the present political age, will not be able to over-come the specifically German limitations without overcoming the universallimitation of the present political age.

It is not radical revolution or universal human emancipation which is autopian dream for Germany; it is the partial, merely political revolution, therevolution which leaves the pillars of the building standing. What is the basisof a partial and merely political revolution? Its basis is the fact that one partof civil society emancipates itself and attains universal domination, that oneparticular class undertakes from its particular situation the universal emanci-pation of society. This class liberates the whole of society, but only on condi-tion that the whole of society finds itself in the same situation as this class,e.g. possesses or can easily acquire money and education.

No class of civil society can play this role without awakening a momentof enthusiasm in itself and in the masses; a moment in which this class frat-ernizes and fuses with society in general, becomes identified with it and isexperienced and acknowledged as its universal representative; a moment inwhich its claims and rights are truly the rights and claims of society itself andin which it is in reality the heart and head of society. Only in the name of theuniversal rights of society can a particular class lay claim to universal domi-nation. Revolutionary energy and spiritual self-confidence are not enough tostorm this position of liberator and to ensure thereby the political exploita-tion of all the other spheres of society in the interests of one’s own sphere. Ifthe revolution of a people and the emancipation of a particular class [Klasse] ofcivil society are to coincide, if one class is to stand for the whole of society,then all the deficiences of society must be concentrated in another class [Stand],one particular class must be the class which gives universal offence, the embod-iment of a general limitation; one particular sphere of society must appear asthe notorious crime of the whole of society, so that the liberation of this sphereappears as universal self-liberation. If one class [Stand] is to be the class of lib-eration par excellence, then another class must be the class of overt oppression.


The negative general significance of the French nobility and the French clergydetermined the positive general significance of the class which stood nearestto and opposed to them—the bourgeoisie.

But in Germany every particular class lacks not only the consistency,acuteness, courage, and ruthlessness which would stamp it as the negativerepresentative of society; equally, all classes lack that breadth of spirit whichidentifies itself, if only for a moment, with the spirit of the people, thatgenius which can raise material force to the level of political power, thatrevolutionary boldness which flings into the face of its adversary the defi-ant words: I am nothing and I should be everything. The main feature of Ger-man morality and honor, not only in individuals but in classes, is that mod-est egoism which asserts its narrowness and allows that narrowness to beused against it. The relationship of the different spheres of German societyis therefore epic rather than dramatic. Each begins to experience itself andto set up camp alongside the others with its own particular claims, not assoon as it is oppressed but as soon as circumstances, without any contri-bution from the sphere concerned, create an inferior social stratum whichit in its turn can oppress. Even the moral self-confidence of the German mid-dle class is based simply on an awareness of being the general representa-tive of the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes. It is therefore notonly the German kings who mount the throne mal-à-propos, but everysphere of civil society which experiences defeat before it celebrates victory,develops its own limitations before it overcomes the limitations confrontingit, and asserts its narrow-mindedness before it has had a chance to assertits generosity. As a result, even the opportunity of playing a great role hasalways passed by before it was ever really available and every class, as soonas it takes up the struggle against the class above it, is involved in a strug-gle with the class beneath it. Thus princes struggle against kings, bureau-crats against aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie against all of these, while theproletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie. Themiddle class scarcely dares to conceive of the idea of emancipation from itsown point of view, and already the development of social conditions andthe progress of political theory have demonstrated this point of view to beantiquated or at least problematical.

In France it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything.In Germany no one may be anything unless he renounces everything. InFrance partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germanyuniversal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation.In France it is the reality, in Germany the impossibility, of emancipation instages that must give birth to complete freedom. In France each class of the


people is a political idealist and experiences itself first and foremost not as aparticular class but as the representative of social needs in general. The roleof emancipator therefore passes in a dramatic movement from one class of theFrench people to the next, until it finally reaches that class which no longerrealizes social freedom by assuming certain conditions external to man andyet created by human society, but rather by organizing all the conditions ofhuman existence on the basis of social freedom. In Germany, however, wherepractical life is as devoid of intellect as intellectual life is of practical activity,no class of civil society has the need and the capacity for universal emanci-pation unless under the compulsion of its immediate situation, of materialnecessity and of its chains themselves.

So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of

civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class [Stand] which is thedissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because ofits universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because thewrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of soci-ety which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a humanone, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the consequences butin all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system; andfinally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itselffrom—and thereby emancipating—all the other spheres of society, which is,in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself onlythrough the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a par-ticular class is the proletariat.

The proletariat is only beginning to appear in Germany as a result of theemergent industrial movement. For the proletariat is not formed by naturalpoverty but by artificially produced poverty; it is formed not from the massof people mechanically oppressed by the weight of society but from themass of people issuing from society’s acute disintegration and in particularfrom the dissolution of the middle class. (Clearly, however, the ranks of theproletariat are also gradually swelled by natural poverty and Christian-Ger-manic serfdom.)

When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing world order, itis only declaring the secret of its own existence, for it is the actual dissolutionof that order. When the proletariat demands the negation of private property, itis only elevating to a principle for society what society has already made a prin-ciple for the proletariat, what is embodied in the proletariat, without its con-sent, as the negative result of society. The proletarian then finds that he has thesame right, in relation to the world which is coming into being, as the German


King in relation to the world as it is at present when he calls the people his peo-ple just as he calls his horse his horse. By calling the people his private prop-erty, the king is merely declaring that the owner of private property is king.

Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the pro-letariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy; and once the lightning ofthought has struck deeply into this virgin soil of the people, emancipation willtransform the Germans into men.

Let us sum up the result:The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation

from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supremebeing for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if itemancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the MiddleAges. In Germany no form of bondage can be broken without breaking allforms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannotmake a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the Germanis the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heartthe proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence[Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself with-out the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy.

When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrectionwill be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.

NOTES

1. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 171.2. Ibid.3. Ibid.

“CONCERNING FEUERBACH” (1845)

IThe chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbachincluded) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the formof the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, notsubjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side wasdeveloped abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sen-suous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct fromthe thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objec-


tive activity. Hence, in Das Wesen des Christentums, he regards the theoreticalattitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived andfixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the sig-nificance of “revolutionary,” of “practical-critical,” activity.

IIThe question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking isnot a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth,i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. Thedispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from prac-tice is a purely scholastic question.

IIIThe materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances andupbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essen-tial to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide soci-ety into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activityor self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolu-tionary practice.

IVFeuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplica-tion of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consistsin resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basisdetaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in theclouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions withinthis secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood inits contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after theearthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former mustthen itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

VFeuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but hedoes not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.

VIFeuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But thehuman essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its real-ity it is the ensemble of the social relations.

“Concerning Feuerbach” (1845) 183

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is con-sequently compelled:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentimentas something by itself and to presuppose an abstract—isolated—human indi-vidual.

2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus,” as an inter-nal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.

VIIFeuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself asocial product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyzes belongs toa particular form of society.

VIIIAll social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysti-cism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehensionof this practice.

IXThe highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialismwhich does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the con-templation of single individuals and of civil society.

XThe standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of thenew is human society, or social humanity.

XIThe philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the pointis to change it.

“SOCIAL PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY” (1847)

“What is the alpha and omega of the Christian faith? The dogma oforiginal sin and salvation. And therein lies the link of solidarity among human-ity at its highest potential; one for all and all for one.”

Happy people! The cardinal question is solved forever. The proletariat willfind two inexhaustible life sources under the double wings of the Prussian eagle


and the Holy Ghost: first, the income tax surplus over and above the ordinaryand extraordinary needs of the state, which surplus is equal to null; and sec-ond, the revenues from the heavenly domains of original sin and salvation,which are likewise equal to null. Both of these nulls provide a splendid groundfor the one-third of the nation that has no land for its subsistence, and a pow-erful support for another third which is in decline. In any case, imaginary sur-pluses, original sin, and salvation will satisfy the hunger of the people in quitea different way from the long speeches of the liberal deputies!

It is said further: “In the ‘Our Father’ we pray: ‘Lead us not into tempta-tion.’ And what we ask for ourselves we must also practice toward our neigh-bors. But our social conditions do indeed tempt man, and excessive miseryincites to crime.”

And we, the gentlemen bureaucrats, judges, and consistorial councilors ofthe Prussian State, exercise this respect [for our fellow men] by joyfully wrack-ing people on the wheel, beheading, imprisoning, and flogging, and thereby“leading” the proletarians “into temptation,” so that later they too can wrack,behead, imprison, and flog us. And that will not fail to happen.

“Such conditions,” the consistorial councilor declares, “a Christian Statemust not tolerate; it must find a remedy for them.”

Yes, with absurd babble about society’s duties of solidarity, with imaginarysurpluses and blank checks drawn on God the Father, Son, and Company.

“We can also be spared the already tedious talk about communism,” ourobservant consistorial councilor remarks. “If those whose calling it is wouldonly develop the social principles of Christianity, the communists would soonbecome silent.”

The social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred yearsto develop, and need no further development by the Prussian consistorialcouncilors.

The social principles of Christianity justified slavery in antiquity, glorifiedmedieval serfdom, and, when necessary, also know how to defend the oppres-sion of the proletariat, although they may do so with a piteous face.

The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling andan oppressed class, and for the latter they have only the pious wish that theformer will be benevolent.

The social principles of Christianity transfer the consistorial councilors’ set-tlement of all infamies to heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of theseinfamies on earth.

The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressorsagainst the oppressed to be either just punishment for original sin and other sins,or suffering that the Lord in his infinite wisdom has destined for those redeemed.

“Social Principles of Christianity” (1847) 185

The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt,abasement, submission, humility—in brief, all the qualities of the canaille; andthe proletariat, not wishing to be treated as canaille, needs its courage, its self-respect, its pride, and its sense of independence even more than its bread.

The social principles of Christianity are hypocritical, but the proletariat isrevolutionary.

So much for the social principles of Christianity.


In these occasional essays and outline notes we find Marx and Engelscommenting on contemporary religious events and placing them in conti-nuity with Western religious history. The two essays by Engels reflect thesame interest. Both were impressed with what religion can do when itbecomes the energy and organizing instrument of the poor in their strug-gle against the powerful. We end with three letters. One by Jenny Marx(1865) takes pride in the debates exploding around Darwin and hishypothesis concerning evolution. Another is from Marx to Engels (1864)complaining about failing health. And the last letter, written late in Marx’slife (1881) shows that he shared with Engels a continuing interest in reli-gion and its messianic vision, its utopian hope of revolutionary change.

187

P A R T V

Occasional Writings

M A R X

“THE DECAY OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY” (FROM NEW YORK TRIBUNE)(1854)

The days in which religious considerations were a governing elementin the wars of Western Europe are, it seems, long gone by. The Treaty

of Westphalia, in 1648, which wound up the Thirty Years’ War in Germany,marks the epoch when such questions lost their force and disappeared as aprime cause of international strife. The attitude of the two great powers of West-ern Europe in the present war against Russia is a striking illustration of this truth.There we see England, professedly Protestant, allied with France, professedlyCatholic (“damnably heretical” as they naturally are in each other’s eyes, accord-ing to the orthodox phraseology of both), for the purpose of defending Turkey,a Mohammedan power whose destruction they ought most religiously to desire,against the aggressions of “holy” Russia, a power Christian like themselves; andthough the position of Austria and Prussia is more equivocal than that of Eng-land and France, the maintenance of the Mussulman Empire in its integrityagainst the assaults of its Christian neighbor to the north is an object that hasbeen avowed and guaranteed equally with France and England by the two greatpowers of Christian Germany. Religious considerations are certainly not theinfluences which restrain them from action against Russia.

To perfectly appreciate this state of things we must call to mind the periodof the Crusades, when Western Europe, as late as the eighteenth century,undertook a “holy war” against the “infidel” Turks for the possession of theHoly Sepulchre. Now Western Europe not only acquiesces in Mussulmanjurisdiction over the Sepulchre but goes so far as to laugh at the contests andrivalries of the Greek and Latin monks for undivided possession of a shrineonce so much coveted by all Christendom; and when Christian Russia stepsforward to “protect” the Christian subjects of the Porte, the Western Europeof today arrays itself in arms against the czar to thwart a design which it wouldonce have deemed highly laudable and righteous. To drive the Moslems outof Europe would once have roused the zeal of England and France; to preventthe Turks from being driven out of Europe is now the most cherished resolveof those nations. So broad a gulf stands between Europe of the nineteenth andEurope of the thirteenth century! So fallen away since the latter epoch is thepolitical influence of religious dogma.

We have carefully watched for any expression of the purely ecclesiasticalview of the European crisis, and have found only one pamphlet by a CambridgeD.D. and one North British review for England, and the Paris Univers for France,

188 Part V: Occasional Writings

“THE DECAY OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY” (FROM NEW YORK TRIBUNE) (1854)

NEW YORK TRIBUNE

which have dogmatically represented the defense of a Mohammedan power byChristendom as absolutely sinful; and these pronunciamentos have remainedwithout an echo in either country. Whence is this?

From the period of the Protestant Reformation, the upper classes in everyEuropean nation, whether it remained Catholic or adopted Protestantism—and especially the statesmen, legalists, and diplomats—began to unfastenthemselves individually from all religious belief, and become so-called free-thinkers. This intellectual movement in the higher circles manifested itselfwithout reserve in France from the time of Louis XIV, resulting in the univer-sal predilection for what was denominated philosophy during the eighteenthcentury. But when Voltaire found residence in France no longer safe, notbecause of his opinions, nor because he had given oral expression to them,but because he had communicated them by his writings to the whole readingpublic, he betook himself to England and testified that he found the solons ofhigh life in London still “freer” than those of Paris. Indeed, the men andwomen of the court of Charles II, Bolingbroke, the Walpoles, Hume, Gibbon,and Charles Fox, are names which all suggest a prevalent unbelief in religiousdogmas, and a general adhesion to the philosophy of that age on the part ofthe upper classes, statesmen, and politicians of England. This may be called,by way of distinction, the era of aristocratic revolt against ecclesiastical author-ity. Comte, in one short sentence, has characterized this situation: “From theopening of the revolutionary period in the sixteenth century this system ofhypocrisy has been more and more elaborated in practice, permitting the eman-cipation of all minds of a certain bearing, on the tacit condition that they shouldaid in protracting the submission of the masses. This was eminently the pol-icy of the Jesuits.”

This brings us down to the period of the French Revolution, when themasses, first of France, and afterward of all Western Europe, along with adesire for political and social freedom, began to entertain an ever growing aver-sion to religious dogma. The total abolition of Christianity as a recognized insti-tution of state by the French Republican Convention of 1793, and since thenthe gradual repeal in Western Europe, wherever the popular voice has hadpower, of religious tests and political and civil disabilities of the same charac-ter, together with the Italian movement of 1848, sufficiently announce the well-known direction of the popular mind in Europe. We are still witnesses of thisepoch, which may be characterized as the era of democratic revolt againstecclesiastical authority.

But this very movement among the masses since the French Revolution,bound up as it was with the movement for social equality, brought about inhigh quarters a violent reaction in favor of church authority. Nobility and

Marx: “The Decay of Religious Authority” (1854) 189

clergy, lords temporal and lords spiritual, found themselves equally threatenedby the popular movement, and it naturally came to pass that the upper classof Europe threw aside their skepticism in public life and made an outwardalliance with the state churches and their systems. This reaction was mostapparent in France, first under Bonaparte and during the Restoration underthe older branch of the Bourbons, but it was not less the case with the rest ofWestern Europe. In our own day we have seen renewed on a smaller scale thispatching up of an alliance offensive and defensive between the upper classesand the ecclesiastical interest. Since the epoch of the 1830s the statesmen hadbegun to manifest anew a spirit of independence toward ecclesiastical control,but the events of 1848 threw them back into the arms of Mother Church. AgainFrance gave the clearest exemplification of this phenomenon. In 1849, whenthe terror of the democratic deluge was at its height, Messrs. Thiers, De Hau-ranne, and the Universitarians (who had passed for atheists with the clergy),together with the so-called Liberal Opposition, were unanimous in support-ing that admirably qualified “savior of religion,” M. Bonaparte [Napoleon III],in his project for the violent restoration of the Pope of Rome, while the Whigministry of Protestant England, at whose head was a member of the ultra-Protestant family of Russell, were warm in their approval of the same expedi-tion. This religious restoration by such processes was indeed redeemed fromuniversal ridicule only by the extremely critical posture of affairs which forthe moment, in the interest of “order,” did not allow the public men of Europeto indulge in the sense of the ludicrous.

But the submission of the classes of leading social influence to ecclesias-tical control, which was hollow and hypocritical at the beginning of this cen-tury after the Revolution of 1792, has been far more precarious and superfi-cial since 1848, and is only acknowledged by those classes so far as it suitstheir immediate political interest. The humiliating position of utter depend-ence which the ecclesiastical power sustains toward the temporal arm of gov-ernment has been made fully manifest since 1848. The Pope, indebted to theFrench Government for his present tenure of the chair of St. Peter; the Frenchclergy, for the bulk of their salaries, blessing trees of liberty and proclaimingthe sovereignty of the people, and afterward canonizing the present Emperorof France as the chosen instrument of God and the savior of religion, their oldproper doctrines of legitimacy and the divine right of kings being in each caselaid aside with the downfall of the corresponding political regime; the Angli-can clergy, whose ex officio head is a temporal Queen, dependent for promo-tion on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, now generally a liberal,and looking for favors and support against popular encroachment to Parlia-


ment in which the liberal element is ever on the increase—constitute an ensem-ble from which it would be absurd to expect acts of pure ecclesiastical inde-pendence, except in the normally impossible case of an overwhelming popu-lar support to fall back upon.

Such was the position of affairs in 1853, when the governing classes ofEngland and France deemed it necessary and politic to espouse the cause ofthe Ottoman Porte against the Christian Czar; and that policy was not onlysanctioned, but in a measure forced upon them by the popular sentiment ofthe two nations. Then the governments of France and England entered upona policy totally inconsistent with religious considerations, and threw off unhesi-tatingly their feigned ecclesiastical alliances. Then at length the upper-class cur-rent of revolt (which had been so long dissembled) formed a juncture withthe broad popular current, and the two together, like the Missouri and the Mis-sissippi, rolled onward a tide of opinion which the ecclesiastical power saw itwould be madness to encounter. Beneath this twofold assault the pure eccle-siastical point of view has not dared to manifest itself; while, on the contrary,the state clergy of England, on the appointed day of the national fast andhumiliation, had to pray and preach patriotic sermons on behalf of the suc-cess of the Crescent and its allies. These considerations seem to afford a rationalexplanation of two apparent anomalies with which we started; namely, thedefense of the Crescent by allied Catholic and Protestant Europe against theassault of the Cross, as represented by Christian Russia, and the fact that novoice of any influence has been lifted up to denounce to Christendom themoral position in which it is placed.

The coalition between the politicians of Western Europe and the popularopinion in behalf of a purely secular policy is likely to generate ulterior con-sequences and to subject ecclesiastical influence to further shocks from its oldaccomplices, the politicians. It is doubtless owing to the ripeness of the pub-lic mind in this respect that Lord Palmerston ventured to refuse the requestof the Edinburgh Presbytery for a day of public fast and humiliation to avertthe divine scourge of cholera, the Home Secretary audaciously averring thatprayers would be of no consequence unless they cleansed their streets andhabitations, and that cholera was generated by natural causes, such as delete-rious gases from decomposed vegetable matter. The vain and unscrupulousPalmerston knew that buffeting the clergy would be a cheap and easy way ofacquiring popularity, otherwise he would not have ventured on the experiment.

A further evidence of the extreme incompetence of ecclesiastical policy toanswer the exigencies of the European situation is found in the considerationthat the ecclesiastical view, if logically carried out, would condemn Catholic

Marx: “The Decay of Religious Authority” (1854) 191

Europe to total indifference to the present European crisis; for though it mightbe permissible for Anglican orthodoxy to side with the Greek Cross againstthe Turkish Crescent, Catholic Europe could not unite with so impious adenier of the authority of the successor of St. Peter and so unhallowed a pre-tender to the highest spiritual functions as the Czar of Russia, and wouldapparently have no other opinion to utter than that both the belligerent par-ties were inspired by Satan!

To complete the disparagement which ecclesiastical authority has under-gone in the present European crisis, it is patent to the world that while theadvanced communities of Western Europe are in a forward stage of ecclesi-astical decay, on the other hand, in barbarian Russia the state church retainsa powerful and undiminished vigor. While Western Europe, discarding reli-gious biases, has advanced in defense of “right against might” and “for theindependence of Europe,” “holy” Russia has claimed for its war of mightagainst right a religious sanction as a war of the vice-regent of God againstthe infidel Turks. It is true that Nesselrode, in his state papers, has neverhad the assurance in the face of Europe to appeal to the ecclesiastical aspectof the question, and this is in itself a remarkable symptom of the decline ofthe ecclesiastical sentiment; this method of treatment is reserved by theRussian Court for internal use among the ignorant and credulous Mus-covites, and the miracle pictures, the relics, the crusading proclamations ofthe Russian generals show how much stress is there laid upon the religiousphase of the struggle for inflaming the zeal of the Russian people and army.Even the St. Petersburg journals do not omit to cast in the teeth of Franceand England the reproach that they are fighting on behalf of the abhorredCrescent against the religion of the Cross. Such a contrast between religiousRussia and secular France and England is worthy of a profound and thor-ough examination, which we cannot undertake to give it, our object beingsimply to call to these large, impressive, and novel facts a degree of atten-tion they have not hitherto received. They are facts which perhaps the philo-sophic and religious historians of the future will alone be able to appreciateat their exact value. They appear, however, to constitute an important stepin the great movement of the world toward abrogating absolute authorityand establishing the independence of individual judgment and consciencein the religious as well as the political sphere of life. To defend or attack thatmovement is not our purpose; our duty is discharged in the simple attesta-tion of its progress.


EXCERPTS FROM GRUNDRISSE (1858)

The Grundrisse (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), writ-ten 1857–1858, consists of detailed notes rather than a systematic outline.

LUTHER AS AN ECONOMIST

Thus Misselden, a London merchant, in his book, Free Trade, or, theMeanes to Make Trade Florish. London, 1622 (p. 7). He compares the order ofthe exchange system of money and commodities with the fate of both sons ofold Jacob, who put his right hand on the younger son and the left one on theolder one. . . .

In the same way as Misselden, the oldest German national economist, Dr.Martin Luther, complains: “This it cannot be denied, that buying and sellingare a necessary thing, with which one cannot dispense, and can well be ofChristian use, especially in things that serve need and honor. For the Patri-archs too sold and bought: cattle, wool, grain, butter, milk, and other goods.These are God’s gifts, which he gives from the earth and apportions amongmen. But the foreign commerce which brings goods from Calcutta and Indiaand such, those precious silks and gold works and spices, which only servefor splendor and are of no practical use, and suck the money from countryand people, ought not to be permitted. . . .”

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH AND MONEY

The imposition by the Popes of church tax estimates in practically allCatholic Christian countries contributed not a little to the development of theentire monetary system in industrial Europe and, in consequence, to the gene-sis of various attempts at circumventing the Church’s command (against inter-est). The Pope made use of the Lombards for the exaction of investiture mon-eys and other dues from the archbishoprics. These leading usurers andpawnbrokers were under papal protection. Known as long ago as the middle ofthe twelfth century, they called themselves “official usurarii,” “Roman episcopalmoney dealers,” in England. Some bishops of Basel, among others, pawned toJews episcopal rings, silken garments, all the Church paraphernalia, for triflingsums, on which they paid interest. But bishops, abbots, priests themselves also

Marx: Excerpts From Grundrisse (1858) 193

EXCERPTS FROM GRUNDRISSE (1858)GRUNDRISSE

practiced usury with Church paraphernalia by pawning them to Tuscan moneydealers from Florence, Siena, and other cities for a portion of the gain. . . .

When money is the universal equivalent, the general power of purchasing, every-thing is purchasable, everything is exchangeable for money. But a thing can betransformed into money only when it is alienated, when the possessor hasdivested himself of it. Everything external or of indifference to the individual istherefore alienable. The so-called inalienable, eternal possessions and the immov-able, fixed property relationships corresponding to them thus break downbefore money. Furthermore, when money itself is in circulation merely to beexchanged for gratification, etc.—for values that can in the end be dissolvedin purely personal gratifications—everything becomes valuable only to theextent that it exists for the individual. The independent value of things—itsrelativity, its exchangeability—except in so far as it exists merely for otherthings, is thereby dissolved. Everything is sacrificed to egoistical gratification.For just as everything is alienable for money, so everything is obtainable withmoney. Everything is to be had for “cash money,” since, in existing externallyto the individual, it is to be caught by fraud, violence, etc. Hence everythingis acquirable by everybody, and it is a matter of accident as to what the indi-vidual may or may not acquire, since it depends only on the money in his pos-session. Thereby the individual by himself is placed as the lord of everything.There are no absolute values, since value as such is relative to money. Thereis nothing inalienable, since everything is alienable through money. There isnothing higher, more sacred, etc., since everything is acquirable with money.The “res sacrae” [“holy things”] and “religiosae,” which could be “in nulliusbonis,” “nec aestimationem recipere, nec obliquari alienarique posse” [“could nei-ther have money estimation nor be put aside”], which are exempt from “com-mercio hominum” [“commercial man”], do not exist before money—as all areequal before God. Beautiful, how the Roman Church in the Middle Ages isitself the chief propagandist of money.

As the Church law against usury had long lost all meaning, [Pope] Mar-tin V also abolished the word itself in 1425 . . . In no country in the MiddleAges was there a general rate of interest. Only the priests were strict. Uncer-tainty of judicial institutions for the security of loans. Hence the higher theinterest rate in individual cases. The scanty circulation of money, the neces-sity to pay in cash, since the exchange business is still undeveloped. Hencegreat variation in the consideration of interest and the notion of usury. In thetimes of Charlemagne, it was considered usurious only when a hundred per-cent was charged. In Lindau and Bodensee, 1344, native citizens charged 2162/3 percent. In Zurich the city council set the legal rate of interest at 43 1/3percent . . . In Italy, 40 percent occasionally had to be paid, although from the


twelfth to the fourteenth centuries the usual rate did not exceed 20 percent. . . Verona ordered the legal rate at 12 1/2 percent . . . Frederick II in hisdecree . . . 10 percent, but applying only to Jews. He would not deign to speakfor Christians. In Rhenish Germany in the thirteenth century 10 percent wasthe usual.

CHRISTIANITY’S CRITICISM OF HEATHENISM

The Christian religion was able to contribute to an objective under-standing of earlier mythologies only when its self-criticism was to a certainextent prepared, as it were potentially. Similarly, only when the self-criticismof bourgeois society had begun was bourgeois political economy able tounderstand the feudal, ancient, and Oriental economies. Insofar as bourgeoispolitical economy did not simply identify itself with the past in a mytholog-ical manner, its criticism of earlier economies—especially of the feudal sys-tem, against which it still had to wage a direct struggle—resembled the crit-icism that Christianity directed against heathenism, or Protestantism directedagainst Catholicism.

EXCERPTS FROM CAPITAL (1867)

THE FURIES OF PRIVATE INTEREST—CHURCHLY AND OTHER

In the field of political economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merelythe same enemy as in all other fields. The peculiar nature of the mate-

rial it treats brings into the field of battle against it the most violent, the mostpetty, the most hateful passions of the human breast, the furies of private inter-est. The High Church of England, for example, will more readily pardon anattack on 38 of its 39 Articles of Faith than on 1/39th of its money income.Nowadays, atheism itself is culpa levis [a small sin], as compared with criti-cism of inherited property relationships. Still, there is an unmistakable advance.I am referring, for example, to the Blue Book published a few weeks ago,“Correspondence with Her Majesty’s Missions Abroad, Regarding IndustrialQuestions and Trades Unions.” The representatives of the English Crownabroad declare here in so many blunt words that in Germany, in France, inbrief, in all the civilized states of the European continent, a transformation inthe existing relations between capital and labor is as palpable and as inevitable

Marx: Excerpts From Capital (1867) 195

EXCERPTS FROM capital (1867)CAPITAL

as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Mr. Wade,Vice-President of the United States of North America, declared in public meet-ings: After the abolition of slavery, a transformation of the relations betweencapital and landed property is the order of the day! These are signs of the times,not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify thattomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that within the ruling classesthemselves the presentiment is dawning that the present society is not solidcrystal, but is an organism capable of transformation and in constant processof transformation.

RELIGION AND THE MATERIAL CONDITIONS OF SOCIETY

For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relationshipof production consists of retaining their relation to their products as com-modities, and hence as values, and thereby reducing their private labor to aform of homogeneous human labor—for such a society, Christianity with itscultus of abstract man, particularly in its bourgeois developments, Protes-tantism, Deism, etc., is the most suitable form of religion. In the modes of pro-duction of ancient Asia, of Antiquity, etc., we find that the conversion of prod-ucts into commodities, and hence the existence of men as mere producers ofcommodities, plays a subordinate role, which, however, increases in impor-tance as the ancient communities approach closer and closer to the stage oftheir decline. Trading nations proper exist in the ancient world only in its inter-stices, like the gods of Epicurus in Intermundia, or like the Jews in the poresof Polish society. These ancient social organisms of production are extraordi-narily more simple and transparent than the bourgeois ones, but they arebased either on the immaturity of the individual man, who has not yet sev-ered the umbilical cord that unites him naturally with his own species, or ondirect master-and-servant relationships. They are conditioned by a lower stageof development of the productive power of labor and the correspondinglyencompassing relationships of men within their material life-generatingprocesses, and hence to each other and to nature. This actual narrowness isreflected ideally in the ancient worship of nature and in folk religions. The reli-gious reflex of the real world can vanish altogether only when the relation-ships of practical everyday life offer men daily visible and reasonable rela-tionships to each other and to nature. The shape of the life process of society,that is, the material process of production, strips off its misty veil only whenit is put forth as a product of freely associated men, under their conscious con-


trol according to plan. This, however, requires a material groundwork of soci-ety, or a series of material conditions of existence which, in their turn, are thenatural product of a long and painful process of development.

Political economy has, to be sure, analyzed, even if incompletely, value andits magnitude, and discovered the hidden content in these forms. It has neverasked the question why that content assumes that form, and why labor is rep-resented by the value of its product and the labor time by the magnitude ofthat labor product. Formulas which carry on their forehead the inscription thatthey belong to a state of society in which the productive process has masteryover man, and man does not yet have mastery over the productive process—such formulas appear to the bourgeois consciousness as much a self-evidentnecessity of nature as productive labor itself. Hence prebourgeois forms of thesocial organism of production are treated by them in much the same way asthe Church Fathers treated pre-Christian religions.

ST. JEROME

In order, therefore, that a commodity may in practice act effectively asexchange value, it must quit its bodily shape, must transform itself from mereimaginary into real gold, although to the commodity such transubstantiationmay be more difficult than to the Hegelian “concept,” the transition from“necessity” to “freedom,” or to a lobster the casting of his shell, or to theChurch Father St. Jerome the stripping off of Old Adam.1

ST. PETER

If the owner of the iron were to go to the owner of some other worldlycommodity, and were to refer him to the price of the iron as proof that it wasalready money, the owner of the latter would reply as did St. Peter to Dantein reciting to him the creed:

Assai bene è trascorsad’esta moneta già la lega e’l peso,Ma dimmi se tu l’hai nella tua borsa.


WORKING ON THE SABBATH

In England, for example, even now occasionally in rural districts a workeris condemned to imprisonment for desecrating the Sabbath by working in thelittle garden in front of his house. The same worker is punished for breach ofcontract if he stays away from his metal, paper, or glass works, even if it befrom a religious whim. The orthodox Parliament has no ear for Sabbath des-ecration if it occurs in the “process of making” capital. A memorial (August1863) in which the London day laborers in fish and poultry shops asked forthe abolition of Sunday labor states that their work in the first six days of theweek runs to an average fifteen-hour day, and on Sunday eight to ten hours.One learns from this memorial that the ticklish gourmandise of the aristocratichypocrites of Exeter Hall encourages this “Sunday labor.” These “holy ones,”so zealous in cute curanda [in the care of their physical well-being], show theirChristianity by the humility with which they bear the overwork, the priva-tions, and the hunger of other persons. Obsequium ventris istis perniciosius est.[Gluttony is for them (the workers) much more pernicious.]

THE MATERIAL BASIS OF RELIGION

Darwin has turned our attention to the history of the technology ofnature, that is, to the formation of the organs of plants as instruments of pro-duction for the life of plants and animals. Does not the history of the forma-tion of the productive organs of social man, the material basis of all socialorganization, deserve equal attention? And would it not be easier to compose,since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that wehave made the one and not the other? Technology reveals the active relation-ship of man to nature, the direct production process which sustains his life,and thereby it also lays bare his social life relationships and the mental con-ceptions flowing from them. Every history, even of religion, that is abstractedfrom this material basis is—uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discoverby analysis the earthly core of misty religious concepts than, conversely, todevelop from actual life relationships their heavenly forms. The latter methodis the only materialistic, and hence the only scientific method.


ECONOMIC ORIGINAL SIN

This primitive accumulation plays in political economy approximatelythe same role as original sin in theology. Adam bit into the apple, and there-upon sin came over the human race. Its origin is explained by its being toldas an anecdote of the past. In times long past there was, on the one side, adiligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; and, on the other, lazy rascalsspending their substance, and more, in dissipation. The legend of the theo-logical original sin tells us, to be sure, how man came to be condemned toearn his bread by the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic originalsin reveals to us why there are people to whom this is by no means necessary.Never mind! So it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, andthe latter, in the end, had nothing to sell except their own skin. And from thisoriginal sin dates the poverty of the great mass that, despite all its labor, hasnothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly,although they have long since ceased to work. Such stale childishness indefense of property is still being chewed over with statesmanlike solemnity byM. Thiers, for example, to the French who once were so intellectual. But assoon as the question of property comes into play, it becomes a sacred duty toadhere to the standpoint of the children’s fable as the only one fit for all agesand states of development. In actual history, it is known, conquest, enslave-ment, robbery with murder, in short, violence, play the great role. In gentlepolitical economy, the idyllic reigns from way back.

THE REFORMATION AND THE PAUPERIZATION OF THE MASSES

The process of forcible expropriation of the people in the sixteenth cen-tury received a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from theconsequent colossal theft of Church property. At the time of the Reformation,the Catholic Church was the feudal proprietor of a great portion of English soiland landed property. The suppression of the monasteries, etc., hurled theirinmates into the proletariat. The Church estates themselves were largely givenaway to rapacious royal favorites, or sold at a ridiculous price to speculatingtenant farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the old, hereditary sub-tenants and combined their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed propertyof the poorer country people in a portion of the Church’s tithes was tacitly con-fiscated. “Pauper ubique jacet” [“The pauper is everywhere subdued”], criedQueen Elizabeth after a journey through England. In the forty-third year of her


reign it was finally necessary to recognize pauperism officially by the intro-duction of a poor tax.

“The authors of this law seem to have been ashamed to state the groundsof it, for [contrary to traditional usage] it has no preamble whatever.”2

By the sixteenth [year of the reign] of Charles I . . . it was declared per-petual, and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form. Theimmediate effects of the Reformation were not its most lasting ones. Churchproperty had formed the religious bulwark of the traditional landed propertyrelationships. With its fall, these were no longer tenable.3

PROTESTANT PARSONS AND THE POPULATION THEORY

If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose Essay on Population appearedin 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than aschoolboyish, superficial plagiary of Defoe, Sir James Stewart, Townsend,Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single sentence thought out byhimself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused was due solely to partyinterest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders in the UnitedKingdom; the “principle of population,” slowly worked out in the eighteenthcentury, and then in the midst of a great social crisis proclaimed with drumsand trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of Condorcet, etc., wasgreeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of allhankerings after human development. Malthus, hugely astonished at his suc-cess, gave himself to stuffing into his book materials superficially compiled,and adding to it new matter, not discovered but annexed by him. Note fur-ther: Although Malthus was a parson of the High Church of England, he hadtaken the monastic vow of celibacy. This was one of the conditions of a fel-lowship in the Protestant University at Cambridge: “We do not allow the mem-bers of the Colleges to be married; as soon as one takes a wife he ceases forth-with to be a member of the College.” (Reports of Cambridge UniversityCommission, p. 172.) This circumstance favorably distinguishes Malthus fromthe other Protestant parsons, who have by themselves shuffled off the Catholiccommand of priestly celibacy and have taken “Be fruitful and multiply” as theirspecial mission, so that they generally contribute everywhere to an increase ofpopulation to a really indecent degree, while at the same time they preach tothe workers the “principle of population.” It is characteristic that the eco-nomical burlesque of the Fall of Man, Adam’s apple, the “urgent appetite,” the“checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid,” as Parson Townsend mer-rily puts it—that this ticklish point was and is monopolized by the Reverends


of Protestant theology, or rather of the Protestant church. With the exceptionof the Venetian monk Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the popu-lation-theory teachers are Protestant parsons. For example, Bruckner, Théoriedu Système animal, in which the whole subject of modern population theoryis exhausted, and to which the passing quarrel between Quesnay and hispupil, Mirabeau père, furnished ideas on the same topic; then Parson Wallace,Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus, and his pupil the arch-Parson ThomasChalmers, to say nothing of the lesser Reverend scribblers in this line. Origi-nally political economy was studied by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke,Hume; by businessmen and statesmen like Thomas More, Temple, Sully, DeWitt, North, Law, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Franklin; and in theory particularly,and with the greatest success, by medical men like Petty, Barbon, Mandeville,Quesnay. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Reverend Mr.Tucker, an important economist of his time, apologized for occupying himselfwith Mammon. Later, and with this very “principle of population,” the hourof the Protestant parsons struck. As if he had a presentiment of their businessbungling, Petty, who treats population as the basis of wealth, and was, likeAdam Smith, an outspoken enemy of the parsons, says: “That religion bestflourishes when the Priests are most mortified, as was before said of the Law,which best flourisheth when lawyers have least to do.” He therefore advisesthe Protestant parsons, if they will not once and for all follow the Apostle Pauland “mortify” themselves by celibacy, “not to breed more Churchmen than thebenefices, as they are now shared out, will receive, that is to say, if there beplaces for about twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will not be safe tobreed up twenty-four thousand ministers, for then the twelve thousand whichare unprovided for will seek ways to get themselves a livelihood, which theycannot do more easily than by persuading the people that the twelve thou-sand incumbents do poison or starve their souls, and misguide them in theirway to Heaven.” (Petty, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, p. 57.) AdamSmith’s position vis-à-vis the Protestant priesthood of his time is characterizedby the following. In A Letter to A. Smith, LL.D, on the Life, Death and Philoso-phy of his Friend, David Hume. By One of the People called Christians (4th ed.,Oxford, 1784), Dr. Horne, High Church Bishop of Norwich, reproves AdamSmith because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan he “embalmed his friendDavid” (Hume) because he told the public how “Hume amused himself on hisdeathbed with Lucian and whist,” and because he even had the impudence towrite of Hume: “I have always considered him both in his lifetime and sincehis death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of perfectly wise and virtuousman, as, perhaps, the nature of human frailty will permit.” The Bishop criesout angrily: “Is it right in you, sir, to hold up to our view as ‘perfectly wise


and virtuous’ the character and conduct of one who seems to have been pos-sessed with an incurable antipathy to all that is called religion; and whostrained every nerve to explode, suppress, and extirpate the spirit of it amongmen, that its very name, if he could effect it, might no more be had in remem-brance?” (Loc. cit., p. 8.) “But let not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Athe-ism cannot be of long continuance” (p. 17). Adam Smith “had the atrociouswickedness to propagate atheism through the land . . . Upon the whole, Doc-tor, your meaning is good; but I think you will not succeed this time. Youwould persuade us, by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is theonly cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against the fear of death. . . You may smile over Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardenedPharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea.” (Loc. cit., pp. 21–22.) One ortho-dox individual among A. Smith’s college visitors writes after his death: “Smith’swell-placed affection for Hume . . . hindered him from being a Christian. Whenhe met with honest men whom he liked . . . he would believe almost anythingthey said. Had he been a friend of the worthy ingenious Horrox he would havebelieved that the moon sometimes disappeared in a clear sky without theinterposition of a cloud . . . He approached to republicanism in his politicalprinciples.” (The Bee, by James Anderson, 18 vols., Edinburgh, 1791–1793,Vol. 3, pp. 166, 165.) Parson Thomas Chalmers suspects Adam Smith of hav-ing invented the category of “unproductive laborers” specifically out of mal-ice against the Protestant parsons, in spite of their blessed work in the vine-yard of the Lord.

RELIGION AND THE MONETARY SYSTEM

The monetary system is essentially a Catholic institution, the credit sys-tem essentially Protestant. “The Scotch hate gold.” In the form of paper, themonetary existence of commodities is only a social existence. It is faith thatbrings salvation. Faith in money value as the immanent spirit of commodi-ties, faith in the mode of production and its predestined order, faith in the indi-vidual agents of production as mere personifications of self-converting capi-tal. But the credit system does not emancipate itself from the basis of themonetary system any more than Protestantism has emancipated itself from thefoundations of Catholicism.


NOTES

1. K. M.: As in his youth St. Jerome had to wrestle with the bodily flesh, as is shownby his struggle in the desert with the attractive women of his imagination, so had he to dothe same in his old age with the spiritual flesh. “I thought,” he says for example, “I was inspirit before the Judge of the Universe.” “Who art thou?” asked a voice. “I am a Christian.”“Thou liest,” thundered the Judge; “thou art only a Ciceronian.”

2. K. M.: William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation, in England and Ire-land (London, 1824), par. 471.

3. K. M.: Mr. Rogers, although formerly professor of political economy in the Univer-sity of Oxford, the ancestral seat of Protestant orthodoxy, emphasizes in his History of Agri-culture [Oxford, 1866] the pauperization of the masses by the Reformation.

E N G E L S

THE PEASANT WAR IN GERMANY (CHAPTER 2) (1850)

The grouping of the then numerous and variegated Estates into biggerentities was made virtually impossible by decentralization, local and provin-cial independence, the industrial and commercial isolation of the provincesfrom each other, and poor communications. It developed only with the gen-eral spread of revolutionary, politico-religious ideas during the Reformation.The various Estates that either embraced or opposed those ideas, concentratedthe nation, painfully and only approximately, into three large camps—thereactionary or Catholic camp, the Lutheran bourgeois reformist camp, and therevolutionary camp. And should we discover little logic in this great divisionof the nation and find partly the same elements in the first two camps, this isexplained by the dissolution of most of the official Estates that came down fromthe Middle Ages, and by the decentralization, which, for the moment, gavethese Estates in different localities opposing orientations. In recent years wehave so often encountered similar facts in Germany that this apparent jumbleof Estates and classes under the much more complicated conditions of the six-teenth century can scarcely surprise us.

In spite of the latest experiences, the German ideology still sees nothingexcept violent theological bickering in the struggles that ended the Middle Ages.If only the people of that time, say our home-bred historians and sages, had cometo an understanding concerning heavenly things, there would have been noground whatever to quarrel over earthly affairs. These ideologists are gullibleenough to accept unquestioningly all the illusions that an epoch makes aboutitself or that ideologists of some epoch make about that epoch. People of thiskind, see, for instance, in the Revolution of 1789 nothing but a somewhat heated

Engels: The Peasant War in Germany (Chapter 2) (1850) 203

THE PEASANT WAR IN GERMANY (CHAPTER 2) (1850)THE PEASANT WAR IN GERMANY

debate on the advantages of a constitutional monarchy over absolutism, in theJuly Revolution a practical controversy on the untenability of right “by the graceof God,” and in the February Revolution an attempt to answer the question:republic or monarchy?, etc. They have hardly any idea to this day of the classstruggles which were fought out in these upheavals and of which the politicalslogan on the banner is every time a bare expression, although notice of themis audible enough not only from abroad, but also in the roar and rumble of manythousands of home proletarians.

Even the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth century involved pri-marily positive material class interests; those were class wars, too, just as thelater internal collisions in England and France were. Although the class strug-gles of that day were carried on under religious shibboleths, and though theinterests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealedbehind a religious screen, this changed nothing in the matter and is easilyexplained by the conditions of the time.

The Middle Ages had developed altogether from the raw. They wiped theold civilization, the old philosophy, politics and jurisprudence off the slate, tobegin anew in everything. The only thing they kept from the old shatteredworld was Christianity and a number of half-ruined towns divested of all theircivilization. As a consequence, just as in every primitive stage of development,the clergy obtained a monopoly on intellectual education, and education itselfbecame essentially theological. In the hands of the clergy politics and jurispru-dence, much like all other sciences, remained mere branches of theology, andwere treated according to the principles prevailing in the latter. Church dog-mas were at the same time political axioms, and Bible quotations had the forceof law in any court. Even as a special estate of jurists was taking shape, jurispru-dence long remained under the tutelage of theology. And this supremacy oftheology in the entire realm of intellectual activity was at the same time aninevitable consequence of the place held by the Church as the most generalsynthesis and sanction of the existing feudal domination.

It is clear that under the circumstances, all the generally voiced attacksagainst feudalism were above all attacks against the Church, and all social andpolitical, revolutionary doctrines were necessarily at the same time and mainlytheological heresies. The existing social conditions had to be stripped of theirhalo of sanctity before they could be attacked.

Revolutionary opposition to feudalism lasted throughout the Middle Ages.It took the shape of mysticism, open heresy, or armed insurrection, all depend-ing on the conditions of the time. As for mysticism, it is well known how muchsixteenth-century reformers depended on it. Münzer himself was largelyindebted to it. The heresies gave expression partly to the reaction of the par-


triarchal Alpine shepherds against the feudalism advancing upon them(Waldenses), partly to the opposition to feudalism of the towns that had out-grown it (the Albigenses, Arnold of Brescia, etc.), and partly to direct peasantinsurrections (John Ball, the Hungarian teacher in Picardy, etc.). We can hereleave aside the patriarchal heresy of the Waldenses, as well as the Swiss insur-rection, for it was in form and content a reactionary, purely local attempt at stem-ming the tide of history. In the other two forms of mediaeval heresy we see, asearly as the twelfth century, the precursors of the great antithesis between theburgher and peasant-plebeian oppositions, which caused the failure of the Peas-ant War. This antithesis is evident all through the later Middle Ages.

The town heresy—and that was the actual official heresy of the MiddleAges—was directed primarily against the clergy, whose wealth and politicalimportance it attacked. Just as the present-day bourgeoisie demands a “gou-vernement à bon marché” (cheap government), the mediaeval burghers chieflydemanded an “église à bon marché” (cheap church). Reactionary in form, likeany heresy that sees only degeneration in the further development of churchand dogma, the burgher heresy demanded the revival of the simple EarlyChristian Church constitution and abolition of exclusive priesthood. Thischeap arrangement would have eliminated monks, prelates, and the Romancourt, in short, everything in the Church that was expensive. The towns,republics themselves, albeit under the protection of monarchs, first enunci-ated in general terms through their attacks upon the Papacy that a republicwas the normal form of bourgeois rule. Their hostility to a number of dogmasand church laws is explained partly by what has already been said and partlyby the conditions in which they lived. Their bitter opposition to celibacy, forinstance, has never been better explained than by Boccaccio. Arnold of Bres-cia in Italy and Germany, the Albigenses in Southern France, John Wycliffe inEngland, Huss and the Calixtines in Bohemia, were the principal representa-tives of this trend. The towns were already a recognized Estate everywhere,and were sufficiently capable of fighting secular feudalism using their privi-leges, either by force of arms or in the Estate assemblies, and that explains quitesimply why the opposition to feudalism appeared only as an opposition to cler-ical feudalism.

We also find, in Southern France as well as in England and Bohemia, thatmost of the lesser nobility joined the towns in their struggle against the clergy,and in their heresies—a phenomenon explained by the dependence of thelesser nobility upon the towns, and by their community of interests as opposedto the princes and prelates. We shall see the same thing in the Peasant War.

The heresy that directly expressed the peasant and plebeian demands, andalmost invariably accompanied an insurrection, was of a totally different


nature. Though it shared all the demands of burgher heresy with regard tothe clergy, the Papacy, and revival of the early Christian Church constitution,it also went infinitely further. It demanded the restoration of early Christianequality among members of the community and the recognition of this equal-ity as a prescript for the burgher world as well. From “equality of the chil-dren of God” it inferred civil equality, and partly even equality of property.Equality of nobleman and peasant, of patrician, privileged burgher and ple-beian, abolition of the corvée, ground-rents, taxes, privileges, and at least themost crying differences in property—those were demands advanced withmore or less determination as natural implications of the early Christian doc-trine. At the time when feudalism was at its zenith there was little to choosebetween this peasant-plebeian heresy, among the Albigenses, for example, andthe burgher opposition, but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it devel-oped into a clearly defined party opinion and usually took an independentstand alongside the heresy of the burghers. That was the case with John Ball,preacher of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in England, alongside the Wycliffe move-ment, and with the Taborites alongside the Calixtines in Bohemia. TheTaborites even showed a republican trend under a theocratic cloak, a viewfurther developed by representatives of the plebeians in Germany in the fif-teenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The fanaticism of mystically minded sects, of the Flagellants and Lollards,etc., which continued the revolutionary tradition in times of suppression, ral-lied round this form of heresy.

At that time the plebeians were the only class that stood outside the exist-ing official society. They stood outside both the feudal and the burgher asso-ciations. They had neither privileges nor property; they did not even have thekind of property the peasant or petty burgher had, weighed down as it waswith burdensome taxes. They were unpropertied and rightless in every respect;their living conditions never even brought them into direct contact with theexisting institutions, which ignored them completely. They were a living symp-tom of the decay of the feudal and guild-burgher society and at the same timethe first precursors of the modern bourgeois society.

This explains why the plebeian opposition even then could not confineitself to fighting only feudalism and the privileged burghers; why, in fantasyat least, it reached beyond the then scarcely dawning modern bourgeois soci-ety; why, an absolutely propertyless group, it questioned the institutions, viewsand conceptions common to all societies based on class antagonisms. In thisrespect, the chiliastic dream-visions of early Christianity offered a very con-venient starting-point. On the other hand, this sally beyond both the presentand even the future could be nothing but violent and fantastic, and of neces-


sity fell back into the narrow limits set by the contemporary situation. Theattack on private property, the demand for common ownership was bound toresolve into a primitive organization of charity; vague Christian equality couldat best resolve into civic “equality before the law”; elimination of all authori-ties finally culminates in the establishment of republican governments electedby the people. The anticipation of communism by fantasy became in realityan anticipation of modern bourgeois conditions.

This violent anticipation of coming historical developments, easilyexplained by the living conditions of the plebeians, is first observed in Ger-many, in Thomas Münzer and his party. The Taborites had a kind of chiliasticcommon ownership, but that was a purely military measure. Only in the teach-ings of Münzer did these communist strains express the aspirations of a realfraction of society. He was the first to formulate them with a certain definite-ness, and since him they have been observed in every great popular upheaval,until they gradually merged with the modern proletarian movement just asthe struggles of free peasants in the Middle Ages against feudal dominationwhich was ensnaring them more and more merged with the struggles of serfsand bondsmen for complete abolition of the feudal system.

While the first of the three large camps, the conservative Catholic camp,embraced all the elements interested in maintaining the existing conditions,i.e., the imperial authorities, the ecclesiastical and a section of the lay princes,the richer nobility, the prelates and the city patricians, the camp of burgher-like moderate Lutheran reforms attracted all the propertied elements of theopposition, the bulk of the lesser nobility, the burghers, and even a portion ofthe lay princes who hoped to enrich themselves through confiscation of churchestates and wanted to seize the opportunity of gaining greater independencefrom the Empire. As to the peasants and plebeians, they united in a revolu-tionary party whose demands and doctrines were most clearly expressed byMünzer.

Luther and Münzer each fully represented his party by his doctrine as wellas by his character and actions.

From 1517 to 1525 Luther underwent quite the same changes as the pres-ent-day German constitutionalists did between 1846 and 1849, and which areundergone by every bourgeois party which, placed for a while at the head of themovement, is outflanked by the plebeian-proletarian party standing behind it.

When in 1517 Luther first opposed the dogmas and statutes of the CatholicChurch, his opposition by no means possessed a definite character. While itdid not overstep the demands of the earlier burgher heresy, it did not, andcould not, rule out any trend which went further. At that early stage all theoppositional elements had to be united, the most aggressive revolutionary


energy displayed, and the sum of the existing heresies against the Catholic ortho-doxy had to find a protagonist. In much the same way our liberal bourgeoisieof 1847 was still revolutionary, called itself socialist and communist, and clam-ored for the emancipation of the working class. Luther’s sturdy peasant natureasserted itself in the stormiest fashion in that first period of his activities.

“If the raging madness” (of the Roman churchmen) “were to continue, itseems to me no better counsel and remedy could be found against it than thatkings and princes apply force, arm themselves, attack those evil people whohave poisoned the entire world, and put an end to this game once for all, witharms, not with words. Since we punish thieves with the halter, murderers withthe sword, and heretics with fire, why do we not turn on all those evil teach-ers of perdition, those popes, cardinals and bishops, and the entire swarm ofthe Roman Sodom with arms in hand, and wash our hands in their blood?”

But this revolutionary ardor was short-lived. Luther’s lightning struckhome. The entire German people was set in motion. On the one hand, peas-ants and plebeians saw the signal to revolt in his appeals against the clergyand in his preaching of Christian freedom; and on the other, he was joined bythe moderate burghers and a large section of the lesser nobility, and evenprinces were drawn into the current. The former believed the day had cometo wreak vengeance upon all their oppressors, the latter only wished to breakthe power of the clergy, the dependence upon Rome and the Catholic hierar-chy, and to enrich themselves on the confiscation of church property. The par-ties defined their positions, and each found its spokesmen. Luther had tochoose between them. He, the protégé of the Elector of Saxony, the reveredprofessor of Wittenberg who had become powerful and famous overnight, thegreat man with his coterie of servile creatures and flatterers, did not hesitatea single moment. He dropped the popular elements of the movement, and tookthe side of the burghers, the nobility, and the princes. His appeals for a warof extermination against Rome were heard no more. Luther now preachedpeaceful progress and passive resistance (cf., for example, The Address to the Ger-man Nobility, 1520, etc.). Invited by Hutten to visit him and Sickingen atEbernburg, the seat of the nobility’s conspiracy against clergy and princes,Luther replied:

“I do not wish the Gospel defended by force and bloodshed. The world wasconquered by the word, the Church is maintained by the Word, by the Wordalso the Church will be revived, and Antichrist, who gained his own withoutviolence, will fall without violence.”

From this turn, or, to be more exact, from this more exact definition ofLuther’s policy, sprang that bartering and haggling over institutions and dog-mas to be retained or reformed, that disgusting diplomatizing, conciliating,


intriguing and compromising, which resulted in the Augsburg Confession,the finally negotiated articles of a reformed burgher church. It was quite thesame kind of petty bargaining that was recently repeated in political form adnauseam at the German national assemblies, conciliatory gatherings, chambersof revision, and Erfurt parliaments. The philistine nature of the official Refor-mation was most markedly evident at these negotiations.

There were good reasons for Luther, henceforth the recognized represen-tative of the burgher reform, to preach progress within the pale of the law. Thebulk of towns espoused the cause of moderate reform, the petty nobilitybecame more and more devoted to it, and a section of the princes struck in,while another vacillated. Success was as good as won, at least in a large partof Germany. The remaining regions could not in the long run withstand thepressure of moderate opposition in the event of continued peaceful develop-ment. Any violent upheaval, meanwhile, was bound to bring the moderateparty into conflict with the extremist plebeian and peasant party, to alienatethe princes, the nobility, and certain towns from the movement, leaving thealternative of either the burgher party being outflanked by the peasants andplebeians, or the entire movement being crushed by a Catholic restoration. Andthere have been examples enough lately of how bourgeois parties seek to steertheir way by means of progress within the pale of the law between the Scyllaof revolution and the Charybdis of restoration, as soon as they have gainedthe slightest victory.

Under the general social and political conditions prevailing in that day theresults of every change were necessarily advantageous to the princes, andinevitably increased their power. Thus the more sharply the burgher reformbroke away from the plebeian and peasant elements the more completely itwas bound to fall under the control of the reformed princes. Luther himselfbecame more and more their vassal, and the people well knew what they weredoing when they accused him of having become, like the others, a flunkey ofthe princes, and when they stoned him at Orlamünde.

When the Peasant War broke out Luther strove to adopt a mediatory atti-tude in regions where the nobility and the princes were mostly Catholic. Heresolutely attacked the governments. He said they were to blame for the rebel-lion because of their oppression; it was not the peasants, but God himself, whorose against them. Yet, on the other hand, he said, the revolt was ungodly, andcontrary to the Gospel. In conclusion he called upon both parties to yield andreach a friendly settlement.

But in spite of these well-meaning mediatory offers, the revolt spreadswiftly and even involved Protestant regions dominated by Lutheran princes,lords, and towns, rapidly outgrowing the “circumspect” burgher reform. The


most determined group of the insurgents under Münzer made its headquar-ters in Luther’s immediate proximity in Thuringia. A few more successes, andthe whole of Germany would be in flames, Luther surrounded and perhapspiked as a traitor, and the burgher reform swept away by the tide of a peas-ant-plebeian revolution. There was no more time for circumspection. All theold animosities were forgotten in the face of the revolution. Compared withthe hordes of peasants, the servants of the Roman Sodom were innocent lambs,sweet-tempered children of God. Burgher and prince, noble and clergyman,Luther and the Pope, all joined hands “against the murderous and plunder-ing peasant hordes.”

“They must be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, covertly andovertly, by everyone who can, just as one must kill a mad dog!” Luther cried.“Therefore, dear sirs, help here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them every-one who can, and should you lose your life, bless you, no better death canyou ever attain.”

Only there should be no false mercy for the peasant. Whoever hath pityon those whom God pities not, whom He wishes punished and destroyed,belongs among the rebels himself. Later the peasants would themselves learnto thank God when they had to give up one cow in order to enjoy the otherin peace, and the princes would learn through the revolution the spirit of themob that must be ruled by force only. “The wise man says: cibum, onus etvirgam asino [“food, pack, and lash for the ass”]. The peasants must have noth-ing but chaff. They do not hearken to the Word, and are foolish, so they musthearken to the rod and the gun, and that serves them right. We must pray forthem that they obey. Where they do not there should not be much mercy. Letthe guns roar among them, or else they will make things a thousand timesworse.”

That was exactly what our late socialist and philanthropic bourgeoisie saidwhen the proletariat claimed its share in the fruits of victory after the Marchevents.

Luther had put a powerful weapon into the hands of the plebeian move-ment by translating the Bible. Through the Bible he contrasted the feudalizedChristianity of his day with the unassuming Christianity of the first century,and the decaying feudal society with a picture of a society that knew nothingof the complex and artificial feudal hierarchy. The peasants had made exten-sive use of this instrument against the princes, the nobility, and the clergy. NowLuther turned it against them, extracting from the Bible a real hymn to theGod-ordained authorities such as no bootlicker of absolute monarchy hadever been able to achieve. Princedom by the grace of God, resigned obedience,even serfdom, were sanctioned with the aid of the Bible. Not the peasant revolt


alone, but Luther’s own mutiny against ecclesiastical and secular authoritywas thereby disavowed; and not only the popular movement, but the burghermovement as well, were betrayed to the princes.

Need we name the bourgeois who recently also gave us examples of sucha disavowal of their own past?

Let us now compare the plebeian revolutionary Münzer, with Luther, theburgher reformist.

Thomas Münzer was born at Stolberg, in the Harz, in 1498. His father issaid to have died on the scaffold, a victim of the tyranny of the Count of Stol-berg. At the age of fifteen Münzer organized a secret union at a Halle schoolagainst the Archbishop of Magdeburg and the Roman Church in general. Hislearning in the theology of his time brought him an early doctor’s degree andthe position of chaplain in a Halle nunnery. Here he treated the church dog-mas and rites with the greatest contempt. At mass he omitted the words of thetransubstantiation, and ate, as Luther said, the almighty gods unconsecrated.Mediaeval mystics, and particularly the chiliastic works of Joachim the Cal-abrese, were the main subject of his studies. What with the Reformation andthe general unrest of his time, the millennium and the day of judgment overthe degenerated church and corrupted world propounded and described bythat mystic, seemed to Münzer imminently close. He preached in the neigh-borhood with great success. In 1520 he went to Zwickau as the first evangel-ical preacher. There he found one of those fanatical chiliastic sects that con-tinued their existence on the quiet in many localities, and whose momentarydejection and retirement concealed the incessantly growing opposition of thelowest strata of society to the prevailing conditions, and who, with the grow-ing unrest, now came into the open ever more boldly and persistently. It wasthe sect of the Anabaptists headed by Niklas Storch. They preached theapproach of the day of judgment and of the millennium; they had “visions,transports, and the spirit of prophecy.” They soon came into conflict with theCouncil of Zwickau. Münzer defended them, though he never joined themunconditionally and would have rather brought them under his own influence.The Council took drastic measures against them; they had to leave the town,and Münzer with them. This was at the close of 1521.

He went to Prague and sought to gain a foothold by joining the remnantsof the Hussite movement. But his proclamation only had the effect of compellinghim to flee from Bohemia as well. In 1522 he became preacher at Allstedt inThuringia. Here he started with reforming the cult. Even before Luther daredto go so far, he entirely discarded the Latin language and ordered the entireBible, and not only the prescribed Sunday Gospels and epistles, to be read tothe people. At the same time, he organized propaganda in his locality. People


flocked to him from all directions, and Allstedt soon became the center of thepopular anti-priest movement for the whole of Thuringia.

Münzer was as yet a theologian before everything else. He still directed hisattacks almost exclusively against the priests. He did not, however, preach quietdebate and peaceful progress, as Luther was already then doing, but contin-ued Luther’s earlier violent sermons, calling upon the princes of Saxony andthe people to rise in arms against the Roman priests.

“Does not Christ say, ‘I came not to bring peace, but the sword’? What mustyou (the princes of Saxony) do with that sword? Only one thing if you wishto be the servants of God, and that is to drive out and destroy the evil oneswho stand in the way of the Gospel. Christ ordered very earnestly (Luke, 19,27): ‘Bring hither mine enemies and slay them before me.’ Do not give us anyempty phrases that the power of God will do without the aid of your sword,since then it would rust in its sheath. . . . Those who stand in the way of God’srevelation must be destroyed mercilessly, as Hezekiah, Cyrus, Josiah, Danieland Elias destroyed the priests of Baal, else the Christian Church will nevercome back to its source. We must uproot the weeds in God’s vineyard at har-vest time. . . . God said in the Fifth Book of Moses, 7: ‘Ye shall not show mercyunto the idolators, but ye shall destroy their altars, and break down theirimages and burn them with fire that I shall not be wroth at you.’”

But these appeals to the princes were of no avail, whereas revolutionarysentiments among the people grew day by day. Münzer, whose ideas becameever more sharply defined and bolder, now broke resolutely away from theburgher Reformation, and henceforth became an outright political agitator.

His philosophico-theological doctrine attacked all the main points notonly of Catholicism, but of Christianity generally. Under the cloak of Christ-ian forms he preached a kind of pantheism, which curiously resembles mod-ern speculative contemplation and at times even approaches atheism. He repu-diated the Bible both as the only and the infallible revelation. The real andliving revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation which has always existedamong all peoples at all times. To hold up the Bible against reason, he main-tained, was to kill the spirit by the letter, for the Holy Spirit of which the Biblespeaks is not something that exists outside; the Holy Spirit is our reason. Faithis nothing else but reason come to life in man, and pagans could therefore alsohave faith. Through this faith, through reason come to life, man became god-like and blessed. Heaven is, therefore, not a thing of another world, and is tobe sought in this life and it is the task of believers to establish this Heaven,the kingdom of God, here on earth. Just as there is no Heaven in the beyond,there is also no Hell and no damnation. Similarly, there is no devil but man’sevil lusts and greed. Christ was a man as we are, a prophet and a teacher, and


his Eucharist is a mere commemoration meal wherein bread and wine areconsumed without any mystic garnishing.

Münzer preached these doctrines mostly cloaked in the same Christianphraseology under which the new philosophy had to hide for some time. Butthe arch heretical fundamental idea is easily discerned in all his writings, andhe obviously took the biblical cloak much less in earnest than many a disci-ple of Hegel in modern times. And yet three hundred years separate Münzerfrom modern philosophy.

Münzer’s political doctrine followed his revolutionary religious conceptionsvery closely, and just as his theology overstepped the current conceptions ofhis time, so his political doctrine went beyond the directly prevailing social andpolitical conditions. Just as Münzer’s religious philosophy approached atheism,so his political program approached communism, and even on the eve of theFebruary Revolution, there was more than one modern communist sect thathad not such a well-stocked theoretical arsenal as was “Münzer’s” in the six-teenth century. This program, less a compilation of the demands of the plebeiansof that day than a visionary anticipation of the conditions for the emancipationof the proletarian element that had scarcely begun to develop among the ple-beians—this program demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdomof God, of the prophesied millennium, by restoring the Church to its originalcondition and abolishing all the institutions that conflicted with this allegedlyearly-Christian, but, in fact, very novel church. By the kingdom of God Münzerunderstood a society in which there would be no class differences or privateproperty and no state authority independent of or foreign to the members ofsociety. All the existing authorities, insofar as they refused to submit and jointhe revolution, were to be overthrown, all work and all property shared incommon, and complete equality introduced. A union was to be established toimplement all this, not only throughout Germany, but throughout Christendom.Princes and lords were to be invited to join, and should they refuse, the unionwas to take up arms and overthrow or kill them at the first opportunity.

Münzer set to work at once to organize the union. His sermons became stillmore militant and revolutionary. He thundered forth against the princes, thenobility, and the patricians with a passion that equaled the fervor of his attacksupon the clergy. He depicted the prevailing oppression in fiery colors, and coun-tered it with his dream-vision of the millennium of social republican equality.He published one revolutionary pamphlet after another and sent emissaries inall directions, while personally organizing the union in Allstedt and its vicinity.

The first fruit of this propaganda was the destruction of the Marienkapelleat Mellerbach near Allstedt, according to the command of the Bible (Deut. 7:6):“Ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images and burn their


graven images with fire.” The princes of Saxony came in person to Allstedt toquell the unrest, and summoned Münzer to the castle. There he delivered asermon the like of which they had not heard from Luther, “that easy-livingflesh of Wittenberg,” as Münzer called him. Münzer maintained that ungodlyrulers, especially priests and monks, who treated the Gospel as heresy, shouldbe killed, and referred to the New Testament for confirmation. The ungodlyhad no right to live save by the mercy of God’s elect. If the princes would notexterminate the ungodly, God would take their sword from them, because theentire community had the power of the sword. The princes and lords are the primemovers of usury, thieving, and robbery; they take all creatures into their pri-vate possession—the fish in the water, the birds in the air, and the plants inthe soil—and still preach to the poor the commandment, “Thou shalt notsteal,” while they themselves take everything they find, rob and oppress thepeasant and the artisan; but when one of the latter commits the slightest trans-gression, he has to hang, and Dr. Lügner says to all this: Amen.

“The masters themselves are to blame that the poor man becomes theirenemy. If they do not remove the causes of the upheaval, how can things gowell in the long run? Oh, dear sirs, how the Lord will smite these old potswith an iron rod! If I say so, I shall stir up the people. So be it!” (Cf. Zim-mermann’s Bauernkrieg, II, p. 75.)

Münzer had the sermon printed. His Allstedt printer was punished byDuke Johann of Saxony with banishment, while Münzer’s writings were to behenceforth censored by the ducal government in Weimar. But he paid no heedto this order. He lost no time in publishing a highly seditious paper in the impe-rial city of Mühlhausen, in which he called on the people “to widen the holeso that all the world may see and understand who our great personages arethat have blasphemously turned our Lord into a painted manikin,” and whichended with the following words:

“All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that theungodly will be thrown off their seats, and the downtrodden will rise.”

Thomas Münzer, “the man with the hammer,” wrote the following mottoon the title page:

“Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. I have this day set thee overthe nations and over the kingdoms to root out, and to pull down, and todestroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant. A wall of iron against thekings, princes, priests, and against the people of the land hath been erected.Let them fight, for victory will wondrously lead to the perdition of the strongand godless tyrants.”

Münzer’s breach with Luther and his party had long been an accomplishedfact. Luther had to accept some of the church reforms introduced by Münzer


without consulting him. He watched Münzer’s activities with a moderatereformer’s nettled mistrust of a more energetic farther-aiming party. As earlyas the spring of 1524, in a letter to Melanchthon, that model of a hectic stay-at-home philistine, Münzer wrote that he and Luther did not understand themovement at all. He said they sought to choke it by the letter of the Bible, andthat their doctrine was worm-eaten.

“Dear brethren,” he wrote, “cease your procrastinations and vacillations.It is time, summer is knocking at the door. Do not keep friendship with theungodly who hinder the Word from working its full force. Do not flatter yourprinces, or you may perish with them. Ye tender bookish scholars, be notwroth, for I cannot do otherwise.”

Luther challenged Münzer more than once to an open debate. The latter,however, always ready to take up the battle before the people, had not the leastdesire to let himself in for a theological squabble before the partial public ofWittenberg University. He did not wish “to bring the testimony of the Spiritexclusively before the high school of learning.” If Luther were sincere heshould use his influence to stop the chicaneries against his, Münzer’s printer,and lift the censorhip so that their controversy might be freely fought out inthe press.

But now, when Münzer’s above-mentioned revolutionary brochureappeared, Luther openly denounced him. In his Letter to the Princes of Saxonyagainst the Rebellious Spirit, he declared Münzer to be an instrument of Satan,and demanded of the princes to intervene and drive the instigators of theupheaval out of the country, since they did not confine themselves to preach-ing their evil doctrine, but incited to insurrection, to violent action against theauthorities.

On August 1, Münzer was compelled to appear before the princes in thecastle of Weimar on the charge of incitement to mutiny. Highly compromis-ing facts were brought against him; they were on the scent of his secret union;his hand was detected in the societies of the miners and the peasants. He wasthreatened with banishment. No sooner had he returned to Allstedt than helearned that Duke Georg of Saxony demanded his extradition. Union lettersin his handwriting had been intercepted, in which he called Georg’s subjectsto armed resistance against the enemies of the Gospel. The Council would haveextradited him had he not left the town.

In the meantime, the growing unrest among the peasants and plebeians hadmade Münzer’s propaganda work incomparably easier. In the Anabaptists hefound invaluable agents for that purpose. This sect, which had no definite dog-mas, held together only by its common opposition to all ruling classes and bythe common symbol of the second baptism, ascetic in their mode of living,


untiring, fanatical, and intrepid in carrying on propaganda, had grouped itselfmore and more closely around Münzer. Made homeless by persecutions, itsmembers wandered all over Germany and carried everywhere word of the newteaching, in which Münzer had made their own demands and wishes clear tothem. Countless Anabaptists were put on the rack, burned, or otherwise exe-cuted, but the courage and endurance of these emissaries were unshakeable,and the success of their activities amidst the rapidly growing unrest of the peo-ple was enormous. Thus, on his flight from Thuringia, Münzer found theground prepared wherever he turned.

Near Nuremberg, where Münzer first went, a peasant revolt had beennipped in the bud a month before. Münzer conducted his propaganda clan-destinely; people soon appeared who defended his most audacious theolog-ical propositions on the non-obligatory nature of the Bible and the mean-inglessness of the sacraments, who declared Christ a mere man, and thepower of the secular authorities ungodly. “There is Satan stalking, the Spiritof Allstedt!” Luther exclaimed. In Nuremberg Münzer printed his reply toLuther. He accused him of flattering the princes and supporting the reac-tionary party through his insipid moderation. But the people would freethemselves nonetheless, he wrote, and it would go with Dr. Luther as with acaptive fox. The Council ordered the confiscation of the paper, and Münzerhad to leave Nuremberg.

Now he went via Swabia to Alsace, then to Switzerland, and then back tothe Upper Black Forest, where an insurrection had broken out several monthsbefore, largely precipitated by his Anabaptist emissaries. This propaganda tourof Münzer’s unquestionably and substantially contributed to the establishmentof the people’s party, to a clear formulation of its demands, and to the finalgeneral outbreak of the insurrection in April 1525. This trip particularlybrought out the dual effect of Münzer’s activities—on the one hand, on thepeople, whom he addressed in the only language they could then understand,that of religious prophecy; and, on the other hand, on the initiated, to whomhe could disclose his ultimate aims. Even before his journey he had assem-bled in Thuringia a group of resolute men from among the people and thelower clergy, whom he had put at the head of his secret society. Now he becamethe soul of the entire revolutionary movement in South-Western Germany,organized ties between Saxony and Thuringia through Franconia and Swabiaas far as Alsace and the Swiss border, and counted among his disciples andthe heads of the union South-German agitators such as Hubmaier of Wald-shut, Conrad Grebel of Zürich, Franz Rabmann of Griessen, Schappeler ofMemmingen, Jakob Wehe of Leipheim, and Dr. Mantel in Stuttgart, who weremostly revolutionary priests. He himself stayed mostly in Griessen on the


Schaffhausen border, journeying from there through Hegau, Klettgau, etc. Thebloody persecutions undertaken everywhere by the alarmed princes and lordsagainst this new plebeian heresy, contributed not a little to fan the spirit ofrebellion and consolidate the ranks of the society. In this way Münzer con-ducted his agitation for about five months in Upper Germany, and returnedto Thuringia when the outbreak of the conspiracy was near at hand, becausehe wished to lead the movement personally. There we shall find him later.

We shall see how truly the character and behavior of the two party lead-ers reflected the attitude of their respective parties, how Luther’s indecisionand fear of the movement, which was assuming serious proportions, and hiscowardly servility to the princes, fully corresponded to the hesitant andambiguous policy of the burghers, and how Münzer’s revolutionary energy andresolution was reproduced among the most advanced section of the plebeiansand peasants. The only difference was that while Luther confined himself toexpressing the conceptions and wishes of the majority of his class and therebywon an extremely cheap popularity among it, Münzer, on the contrary, wentfar beyond the immediate ideas and demands of the plebeians and peasants,and first organized a party of the élite of the then existing revolutionary ele-ments, which, inasmuch as it shared his ideas and energy, was never more thana small minority of the insurgent masses.

ON THE HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY (1895)

I

The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblancewith the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Chris-

tianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as thereligion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights,of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the work-ers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Chris-tianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialismplaces it in this world, in a transformation of society. Both are persecuted andbaited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws,the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state,enemies of religion, the family, social order. And in spite of all persecution,nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead. Three hun-dred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion

Engels: On the History of Early Christianity (1895) 217

ON THE HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY (1895)ON THE HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY

in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itselfa position which makes its victory absolutely certain.

If, therefore, Prof. Anton Menger wonders in his Right to the Full Productof Labour why, with the enormous concentration of landownership under theRoman emperors and the boundless sufferings of the working class of thetime, which was composed almost exclusively of slaves, “socialism did not fol-low the overthrow of the Roman Empire in the West,” it is because he cannotsee that this “socialism” did in fact, as far as it was possible at the time, existand even became dominant—in Christianity. Only this Christianity, as wasbound to be the case in the historic conditions, did not want to accomplishthe social transformation in this world, but beyond it, in heaven, in eternallife after death, in the impending “millennium.”

The parallel between the two historic phenomena forces itself upon ourattention as early as the Middle Ages in the first risings of the oppressed peas-ants and particularly of the town plebeians. These risings, like all mass move-ments of the Middle Ages, were bound to wear the mask of religion andappeared as the restoration of early Christianity from spreading degeneration*;but behind the religious exaltaton there was every time a very tangible worldlyinterest. This appeared most splendidly in the organization of the BohemianTaborites under Jan Zika, of glorious memory; but this trait pervades thewhole of the Middle Ages until it gradually fades away after the German Peas-ant War to revive again with the workingmen Communists after 1830. TheFrench revolutionary Communists, as also in particular Weitling and his sup-porters, referred to early Christianity long before Renan’s words: “If I wantedto give you an idea of the early Christian communities I would tell you tolook at a local section of the International Working Men’s Association.”

This French man of letters, who by mutilating German criticism of the Biblein a manner unprecedented even in modern journalism composed the novelon church history Origines du Christianisme, did not know himself how muchtruth there was in the words just quoted. I should like to see the old “Inter-national” who can read, for example, the so-called Second Epistle of Paul tothe Corinthians without old wounds re-opening, at least in one respect. Thewhole epistle, from chapter eight onwards, echoes the eternal, and oh! sowell-known complaint: les cotisations ne rentrent pas—contributions are notcoming in! How many of the most zealous propagandists of the sixties wouldsympathizingly squeeze the hand of the author of that epistle, whoever he maybe, and whisper: “So it was like that with you too!” We too—Corinthians werelegion in our Association—can sing a song about contributions not coming inbut tantalizing us as they floated elusively before our eyes. They were thefamous “millions of the International”!


One of our best sources on the first Christians is Lucian of Samosata, theVoltaire of classic antiquity, who was equally sceptic towards every kind of reli-gious superstition and therefore had neither pagan-religious nor politicalgrounds to treat the Christians otherwise than as some other kind of religiouscommunity. On the contrary, he mocked them all for their superstition, thosewho prayed to Jupiter no less than those who prayed to Christ; from his shal-low rationalistic point of view one sort of superstition was as stupid as theother. This in any case impartial witness relates among other things the life-story of a certain adventurous Peregrinus, Proteus by name, from Parium inHellespontus. When a youth, this Peregrinus made his début in Armenia bycommitting fornication. He was caught in the act and lynched according tothe custom of the country. He was fortunate enough to escape and after stran-gling his father in Parium he had to flee.

“And so it happened”—I quote from Schott’s translation—”that he alsocame to hear of the astonishing learning of the Christians, with whose priestsand scribes he had cultivated intercourse in Palestine. He made such progressin a short time that his teachers were like children compared with him. Hebecame a prophet, an elder, a master of the synagogue, in a word, all in every-thing. He interpreted their writings and himself wrote a great number of works,so that finally people saw in him a superior being, let him lay down laws forthem and made him their overseer (bishop). . . . On that ground (i.e., becausehe was a Christian) Proteus was at length arrested by the authorities andthrown into prison. . . . As he thus lay in chains, the Christians, who saw inhis capture a great misfortune, made all possible attempts to free him. But theydid not succeed. Then they administered to him in all possible ways with thegreatest solicitude. As early as daybreak one could see aged mothers, widowsand young orphans crowding at the door of his prison; the most prominentamong the Christians even bribed the warders and spent whole nights withhim; they took their meals with them and read their holy books in his pres-ence; briefly, the beloved Peregrinus” (he still went by that name) “was no lessto them than a new Socrates. Envoys of Christian communities came to himeven from towns in Asia Minor to lend him a helping hand, to console himand to testify in his favor in court. It is unbelievable how quick these peopleare to act whenever it is a question of their community; they immediately spareneither exertion nor expense. And thus from all sides money then poured into Peregrinus so that his imprisonment became for him a source of greatincome. For the poor people persuaded themselves that they were immortalin body and in soul and that they would live for all eternity; that was whythey scorned death and many of them even voluntarily sacrificed their lives.Then their most prominent lawgiver convinced them that they would all be


brothers one to another once they were converted, i.e., renounced the Greekgods, professed faith in the crucified sophist and lived according to his pre-scriptions. That is why they despise all material goods without distinction andown them in common—doctrines which they have accepted in good faith,without demonstration or proof. And when a skilful imposter who knowshow to make clever use of circumstances comes to them he can manage to getrich in a short time and laugh up his sleeve over these simpletons. For therest, Peregrinus was set free by him who was then prefect of Syria.”

Then, after a few more adventures,“Our worthy set forth a second time” (from Parium) “on his peregrinations,

the Christians’ good disposition standing him in lieu of money for his jour-ney: they administered to his needs everywhere and never let him suffer want.He was fed for a time in this way. But then, when he violated the laws of theChristians too—I think he was caught eating of some forbidden food—theyexcommunicated him from their community.”

What memories of youth come to my mind as I read this passage fromLucian! First of all the “prophet Albrecht” who from about 1840 literally plun-dered the Weitling communist communities in Switzerland for several years—a tall powerful man with a long beard who wandered on foot through Switzer-land and gathered audiences for his mysterious new Gospel of worldemancipation, but who, after all, seems to have been a tolerably harmlesshoaxer and soon died. Then his not so harmless successor, “the doctor” GeorgeKuhlmann from Holstein, who put to profit the time when Weitling was inprison to convert the communities of French Switzerland to his own Gospel,and for a time with such success that he even caught August Becker, by farthe cleverest but also the biggest ne’er-do-well among them. This Kuhlmannused to deliver lectures to them which were published in Geneva in 1845under the title The New World, or the Kingdom of the Spirit on Earth. Proclama-tion. In the introduction, written by his supporters (probably August Becker)we read:

“What was needed was a man on whose lips all our sufferings and all ourlongings and hopes, in a word, all that affects our time most profoundly shouldfind expression. . . . This man, whom our time was waiting for, has come. Heis the doctor George Kuhlmann from Holstein. He has come forward with thedoctrine on the new world or the kingdom of the spirit in reality.”

I hardly need to add that this doctrine of the new world is nothing morethan the most vulgar sentimental nonsense rendered in half-biblical expres-sions à la Lamennais and declaimed with prophet-like arrogance. But this didnot prevent the good Weitlingers from carrying the swindler shoulder-high as


the Asian Christians once did Peregrinus. They who were otherwise arch-democrats and extreme equalitarians to the extent of fostering ineradicable sus-picion against any schoolmaster, journalist, and any man generally who wasnot a manual worker as being an “erudite” who was out to exploit them, letthemselves be persuaded by the melodramatically arrayed Kuhlmann that inthe “New World” it would be the wisest of all, id est, Kuhlmann, who wouldregulate the distribution of pleasures and that therefore, even then, in the OldWorld, the disciples ought to bring pleasures by the bushel to that same wis-est of all while they themselves should be content with crumbs. So Peregri-nus Kuhlmann lived a splendid life of pleasure at the expense of the commu-nity—as long as it lasted. It did not last very long, of course; the growingmurmurs of doubters and unbelievers and the menace of persecution by theVaudois Government put an end to the “Kingdom of the Spirit” in Lausanne—Kuhlmann disappeared.

Everybody who has known by experience the European working-class move-ment in its beginnings will remember dozens of similar examples. Today suchextreme cases, at least in the large centers, have become impossible; but inremote districts where the movement has won new ground a small Peregrinusof this kind can still count on a temporary limited success. And just as all thosewho have nothing to look forward to from the official world or have come tothe end of their tether with it—opponents of inoculation, supporters ofabstemiousness, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, nature-healers, free-commu-nity preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of new theo-ries on the origin of the universe, unsuccessful or unfortunate inventors, victimsof real or imaginary injustice who are termed “good-for-nothing pettifoggers” bythe bureaucracy, honest fools and dishonest swindlers—all throng to the work-ing-class parties in all countries—so it was with the first Christians. All the ele-ments which had been set free, i.e., at a loose end, by the dissolution of the oldworld came one after the other into the orbit of Christianity as the only elementthat resisted that process of dissolution—for the very reason that it was the nec-essary product of that process—and that therefore persisted and grew while theother elements were but ephemeral flies. There was no fanaticism, no foolish-ness, no scheming that did not flock to the young Christian communities anddid not at least for a time and in isolated places find attentive ears and willingbelievers. And like our first communist workers’ associations the early Chris-tians too took with such unprecedented gullibility to anything which suitedtheir purpose that we are not even sure that some fragment or other of the “greatnumber of works” that Peregrinus wrote for Christianity did not find its way intoour New Testament.


II

German criticism of the Bible, so far the only scientific basis of ourknowledge of the history of early Christianity, followed a double tendency.

The first tendency was that of the Tübingen school, in which, in the broadsense, D. F. Strauss must also be included. In critical inquiry it goes as far asa theological school can go. It admits that the four Gospels are not eye-witnessaccounts but only later adaptations of writings that have been lost; that no morethan four of the Epistles attributed to the apostle Paul are authentic, etc. Itstrikes out of the historical narrations all miracles and contradictions, con-sidering them as unacceptable; but from the rest it tries “to save what can besaved” and then its nature, that of a theological school, is very evident. Thusit enabled Renan, who bases himself mostly on it, to “save” still more by apply-ing the same method and, moreover, to try to impose upon us as historicallyauthenticated many New Testament accounts that are more than doubtful and,besides, a multitude of other legends about martyrs. In any case, all that theTübingen school rejects as unhistorical or apocryphal can be considered asfinally eliminated for science.

The other tendency has but one representative—Bruno Bauer. His greatestservice consists not merely in having given a pitiless criticism of the Gospelsand the Epistles of the apostles, but in having for the first time seriously under-taken an inquiry into not only the Jewish and Greco-Alexandrian elements butthe purely Greek and Greco-Roman elements that first opened for Christian-ity the career of a universal religion. The legend that Christianity arose readyand complete out of Judaism and, starting from Palestine, conquered the worldwith its dogma already defined in the main and its morals, has been unten-able since Bruno Bauer; it can continue to vegetate only in the theological fac-ulties and with people who wish “to keep religion alive for the people” evenat the expense of science. The enormous influence which the Philonic schoolof Alexandria and Greco-Roman vulgar philosophy—Platonic and mainlyStoic—had on Christianity, which became the state religion under Constan-tine, is far from having been defined in detail, but its existence has been provedand that is primarily the achievement of Bruno Bauer: he laid the foundationof the proof that Christianity was not imported from outside—from Judea—into the Romano-Greek world and imposed on it, but that, at least in its world-religion form, it is that world’s own product. Bauer, of course, like all thosewho are fighting against deep-rooted prejudices, overreached his aim in thiswork. In order to define through literary sources too Philo’s and particularlySeneca’s influence on emerging Christianity and to show up the authors of theNew Testament formally as downright plagiarists of those philosophers he


had to place the appearance of the new religion about half a century later, toreject the opposing accounts of Roman historians and take extensive libertieswith historiography in general. According to him Christianity as such appearsonly under the Flavians, the literature of the New Testament only underHadrian, Antonius, and Marcus Aurelius. As a result the New Testamentaccounts of Jesus and his disciples are deprived for Bauer of any historical back-ground: they are diluted in legends in which the phases of interior develop-ment and the moral struggles of the first communities are transferred to moreor less fictitious persons. Not Galilee and Jerusalem, but Alexandria and Rome,according to Bauer, are the birthplaces of the new religion.

If, therefore, the Tübingen school presents to us in the remains of the NewTestament stories and literature that it left untouched the extreme maximumof what science today can still accept as disputable, Bruno Bauer presents tous the maximum of what can be contested. The factual truth lies between thesetwo limits. Whether that truth can be defined with the means at our disposaltoday is very doubtful. New discoveries, particularly in Rome, in the Orient,and above all in Egypt, will contribute more to this than any criticism.

But we have in the New Testament a single book the time of the writingof which can be defined within a few months, which must have been writtenbetween June 67 and January or April 68; a book, consequently, which belongsto the very beginning of the Christian era and reflects with the most naivefidelity and in the corresponding idiomatic language the ideas of the begin-ning of that era. This book, therefore, in my opinion, is a far more importantsource from which to define what early Christianity really was than all the restof the New Testament, which, in its present form, is of a far later date. Thisbook is the so-called Revelation of John. And as this, apparently the mostobscure book in the whole Bible, is moreover today, thanks to German criti-cism, the most comprehensible and the clearest, I shall give my readers anaccount of it.

One needs but to look into this book in order to be convinced of the stateof great exaltation not only of the author, but also of the “surrounding medium”in which he moved. Our “Revelation” is not the only one of its kind and time.From the year 164 before our era, when the first which has reached us, theso-called Book of Daniel, was written, up to about 250 of our era, the approx-imate date of Commodian’s Carmen, Renan counted no fewer than fifteenextant classical “Apocalypses,” not counting subsequent imitations. (I quoteRenan because his book is also the best known by non-specialists and the mostaccessible.) That was a time when even in Rome and Greece and still more inAsia Minor, Syria, and Egypt an absolutely uncritical mixture of the crassestsuperstitions of the most varying peoples was indiscriminately accepted and


complemented by pious deception and downright charlatanism; a time inwhich miracles, ecstasies, visions, apparitions, divining, gold-making, cabbalaand other secret magic played a primary role. It was in that atmosphere, and,moreover, among a class of people who were more inclined than any other tolisten to these supernatural fantasies, that Christianity arose. For did not theChristian gnostics in Egypt during the second century of our era engage exten-sively in alchemy and introduce alchemistic notions into their teachings, asthe Leyden papyrus documents, among others, prove. And the Chaldean andJudean mathematici, who, according to Tacitus, were twice expelled from Romefor magic, once under Claudius and again under Vitellius, practiced no otherkind of geometry than the kind we shall find at the basis of John’s Revelation.

To this we must add another thing. All the apocalypses attribute to them-selves the right to deceive their readers. Not only were they written as a ruleby quite different people than their alleged authors, and mostly by people wholived much later, for example the Book of Daniel, the Book of Henoch, theApocalypses of Ezra, Baruch, Juda, etc., and the Sibylline books, but, as far astheir main content is concerned, they prophesy only things that had alreadyhappened long before and were quite well known to the real author. Thus inthe year 164, shortly before the death of Antiochus Epiphanes, the author ofthe Book of Daniel makes Daniel, who is supposed to have lived in the timeof Nebuchadnezzar, prophesy the rise and fall of the Persian and Macedonianempires and the beginning of the Roman Empire, in order by this proof of hisgift of prophecy to prepare the reader to accept the final prophecy that thepeople of Israel will overcome all hardships and finally be victorious. If there-fore John’s Revelation were really the work of its alleged author it would bethe only exception among all apocalyptic literature.

The John who claims to be the author was, in any case, a man of great dis-tinction among the Christians of Asia Minor. This is borne out by the tone ofthe message to the seven churches. Possibly he was the apostle John, whosehistorical existence, however, is not completely authenticated but is very prob-able. If this apostle was really the author, so much the better for our point ofview. That would be the best confirmation that the Christianity of this bookis real genuine early Christianity. Let it be noted in passing that, apparently,the Revelation was not written by the same author as the Gospel or the threeEpistles which are also attributed to John.

The Revelation consists of a series of visions. In the first Christ appears inthe garb of a high priest, goes in the midst of seven candlesticks representingthe seven churches of Asia and dictates to “John” messages to the seven “angles”of those churches. Here at the very beginning we see plainly the differencebetween this Christianity and Constantine’s universal religion formulated by


the Council of Nicaea. The Trinity is not only unknown, it is even impossi-ble. Instead of the one Holy Ghost of later we here have the “seven spirits ofGod” construed by the Rabbis from Isaiah XI, 2. Christ is the son of God, thefirst and the last, the alpha and the omega, by no means God himself or equalto God, but on the contrary, “the beginning of the creation of God,” hence anemanation of God, existing from all eternity but subordinate to God, like theabove-mentioned seven spirits. In Chapter XV, 3, the martyrs in heaven sing“the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” glorifyingGod. Hence Christ here appears not only as subordinate to God but even, ina certain respect, on an equal footing with Moses. Christ is crucified inJerusalem (XI, 8) but rises again (I, 5, 18); he is “the Lamb” that has been sac-rificed for the sins of the world and with whose blood the faithful of all tonguesand nations have been redeemed to God. Here we find the basic idea whichenabled early Christianity to develop into a universal religion. All Semitic andEuropean religions of that time shared the view that the gods offended by theactions of man could be propitiated by sacrifice; the first revolutionary basicidea (borrowed from the Philonic school) in Christianity was that by the onegreat voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all times and all men wereatoned for once for all—in respect of the faithful. Thus the necessity of anyfurther sacrifices was removed and with it the basis for a multitude of religiousrites: but freedom from rites that made difficult or forbade intercourse withpeople of other confessions was the first condition of a universal religion. Inspite of this the habit of sacrifice was so deeply rooted in the customs of peo-ples that Catholicism—which borrowed so much from paganism—found itappropriate to accommodate itself to this fact by the introduction of at leastthe symbolical sacrifice of the mass. On the other hand there is no trace what-ever of the dogma of original sin in our book.

But the most characteristic in these messages, as in the whole book, is thatit never and nowhere occurs to the author to refer to himself and his co-believ-ers by any other name than that of Jews. He reproaches the members of the sectsin Smyrna and Philadelphia against whom he fulminates with the fact that they“say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan”; of those in Perg-amos he says: they hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stum-bling-block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and tocommit fornication. Here it is therefore not a case of conscious Christians butof people who say they are Jews. Granted, their Judaism is a new stage of devel-opment of the earlier but for that very reason it is the only true one. Hence, whenthe saints appeared before the throne of God there came first 144,000 Jews,12,000 from each tribe, and only after them the countless masses of heathensconverted to this renovated Judaism. That was how little our author was aware


in the year 69 of the Christian era that he represented quite a new phase in thedevelopment of a religion which was to become one of the most revolutionaryelements in the history of the human mind.

We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unawareof itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmaticallyfixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognized inthe other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christian-ity but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and thatthe struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for the struggle and a cer-tainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians of today and which areto be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the Socialists.

In fact, the struggle against a world that at the beginning was superior inforce, and at the same time against the novators themselves, is common to theearly Christians and the Socialists. Neither of these two great movements weremade by leaders or prophets—although there are prophets enough among bothof them—they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to beconfused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at firstmoves among contradictions, lack of clarity, and lack of cohesion, and alsobecause of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This con-fusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight againstone another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy.So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialistmovement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies whopreached unity where no unity was possible.

Was the International held together by a uniform dogma? On the contrary.There were Communists of the French pre-1848 tradition, among whom againwere various shades: Communists of Weitling’s school and others of the regen-erated Communist League, Proudhonists dominating in France and Belgium,Blanquists, the German Workers’ Party, and finally the Bakuninist anarchists,who for a while had the upper hand in Spain and Italy, to mention only theprincipal groups. It took a whole quarter of a century from the foundation ofthe International before the separation from the anarchists was final and com-plete everywhere and unity could be established at least in respect of most gen-eral economic viewpoints. And that with our means of communication—rail-ways, telegraph, giant industrial cities, the press, organized people’s assemblies.

There was among the early Christians the same division into countlesssects, which was the very means by which discussion and thereby later unitywas achieved. We already find it in this book, which is beyond doubt the old-est Christian document, and our author fights it with the same irreconcilableardor as the great sinful world outside. There were first of all the Nicolaitans,


in Ephesus and Pergamos; those that said they were Jews but were the syna-gogue of Satan, in Smyrna and Philadelphia; the supporters of Balaam, whois called a false prophet, in Pergamos; those who said they were apostles andwere not, in Ephesus; and finally, in Thyatira, the supporters of the falseprophetess who is described as a Jezebel. We are given no more details aboutthese sects, it being only said about the followers of Balaam and Jezebel thatthey ate things sacrificed to idols and committed fornication. Attempts havebeen made to conceive these five sects as Pauline Christians and all the mes-sages as directed against Paul, the false apostle, the alleged Balaam and “Nico-laos.” Arguments to this effect, hardly tenable, are to be found collected inRenan’s Saint Paul (Paris 1869, pp. 303–5 and 367–70). They all tend toexplain the messages by the Acts of the Apostles and the so-called Epistles ofPaul, writings which, at least in their present form, are no less than 60 yearsyounger than the Revelation and the relevant factual data of which, therefore,are not only extremely doubtful but also totally contradictory. But the deci-sive thing is that it could not occur to the author to give five different namesto one and the same sect and even two for Ephesus alone (false apostles andNicolaitans) and two also for Pergamos (Balaamites and Nicolaitans), and torefer to them every time expressly as two different sects. At the same time onecannot deny the probability that there were also elements among these sectsthat would be termed Pauline today.

In both cases in which more details are given the accusation bears on eat-ing meats offered to idols and on fornication, two points on which the Jews—the old ones as well as the Christian ones—were in continual dispute with con-verted heathens. The meat from heathen sacrifices was not only served at festalmeals where refusal of the food offered would have seemed improper and couldeven have been dangerous; it was also sold on the public markets, where it wasnot always possible to ascertain whether it was pure in the eyes of the law. Byfornication the Jews understood not only extra-nuptial sexual relations but alsomarriage within the degrees of relationship prohibited by the Jewish law orbetween a Jew and a gentile, and it is in this sense that the word is generallyunderstood in the Acts of the Apostles XV, 20 and 29. But our John has hisown views on the sexual relations allowed to orthodox Jews. He says, XIV, 4,of the 144,000 heavenly Jews: “These are they which were not defiled withwomen; for they are virgins.” And in fact, in our John’s heaven there is not asingle woman. He therefore belongs to the trend, which also often appears inother early Christian writings, that considers sexual relations generally as sin-ful. And when we moreover take into consideration the fact that he calls Romethe Great Whore with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornica-tion and have become drunk with the wine of fornication and the merchants


of the earth have waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies, it becomesimpossible for us to take the word in the messages in the narrow sense thattheological apologists would like to attribute to it in order thus to catch atsome confirmation of other passages in the New Testament. On the contrary.These passages in the messages are an obvious indication of a phenomenoncommon to all times of great agitation, that the traditional bonds of sexual rela-tions, like all other fetters, are shaken off. In the first centuries of Christianity,too, there appeared often enough, side by side with ascetics which mortifiedthe flesh, the tendency to extend Christian freedom to a more or less unre-strained intercourse between man and woman. The same thing was observedin the modern socialist movement. What unspeakable horror was felt in thethen “pious nursery” of Germany at Saint-Simon’s a réhabilitation de la chair inthe thirties, which was rendered in German as “Wiedereinsetzung des Fleisches”(reinstatement of the flesh)! And the most horrified of all were the then rulingdistinguished estates (there were as yet no classes in our country) who couldnot live in Berlin any more than on their country estates without repeated rein-statement of their flesh! If only those good people had been able to knowFourier, who contemplated quite different pranks for the flesh! With the over-coming of utopianism these extravagances yielded to a more rational and in real-ity far more radical conception, and since Germany has grown out of Heine’spious nursery and developed into the center of the Socialist movement the hyp-ocritical indignation of the distinguished pious world is laughed at.

That is all the dogmatic content of the messages. The rest consists inexhorting the faithful to be zealous in propaganda, to courageous and proudconfession of their faith in face of the foe, to unrelenting struggle against theenemy both within and without—and as far as this goes they could just aswell have been written by one of the prophetically minded enthusiasts of theInternational.

III

The messages are but the introduction to the theme properly so-calledof John’s communication to the seven churches of Asia Minor and throughthem to the remaining reformed Judaism of the year 69, out of which Chris-tianity later developed. And herewith we enter the innermost holy of holiesof early Christianity.

What kind of people were the first Christians recruited from? Mainly fromthe “laboring and burdened,” the members of the lowest strata of the people,as becomes a revolutionary element. And what did they consist of? In the


towns of impoverished free men, all sorts of people, like the “mean whites” ofthe southern slave states and the European beachcombers and adventurers incolonial and Chinese seaports, then of emancipated slaves and, above all,actual slaves; on the large estates in Italy, Sicily, and Africa of slaves, and inthe rural districts of the provinces of small peasants who had fallen more andmore into bondage through debt. There was absolutely no common road toemancipation for all these elements. For all of them paradise lay lost behindthem; for the ruined free men it was the former polis, the town and the stateat the same time, of which their forefathers had been free citizens; for the war-captive slaves the time of freedom before their subjugation and captivity; forthe small peasants the abolished gentile social system and communal landown-ership. All that had been smitten down by the leveling iron fist of conqueringRome. The largest social group that antiquity had attained was the tribe andthe union of kindred tribes; among the barbarians grouping was based onalliances of families and among the town-founding Greeks and Italians on thepolis, which consisted of one or more kindred tribes. Philip and Alexander gavethe Hellenic peninsula political unity but that did not lead to the formationof a Greek nation. Nations became possible only through the downfall ofRoman world domination. This domination had put an end once for all to thesmaller unions; military might, Roman jurisdiction, and the tax-collectingmachinery completely dissolved the traditional inner organization. To the lossof independence and distinctive organization was added the forcible plunderby military and civil authorities who took the treasures of the subjugated awayfrom them and then lent them back at usurious rates in order to extort stillmore out of them. The pressure of taxation and the need for money which itcaused in regions dominated only or mainly by natural economy plunged thepeasants into ever deeper bondage to the usurers, gave rise to great differencesin fortune, making the rich richer and the poor completely destitute. Anyresistance of isolated small tribes or towns to the gigantic Roman world powerwas hopeless. Where was the way out, salvation, for the enslaved, oppressedand impoverished, a way out common to all these groups of people whoseinterests were mutually alien or even opposed? And yet it had to be found ifa great revolutionary movement was to embrace them all.

This way out was found. But not in this world. In the state in which thingswere it could only be a religious way out. Then a new world was disclosed.The continued life of the soul after the death of the body had gradually becomea recognized article of faith throughout the Roman world. A kind of recom-pense or punishment of the deceased souls for their actions while on earthalso received more and more general recognition. As far as recompense wasconcerned, admittedly, the prospects were not so good: antiquity was too


spontaneously materialistic not to attribute infinitely greater value to life onearth than to life in the kingdom of shadows; to live on after death was con-sidered by the Greeks rather as a misfortune. Then came Christianity, whichtook recompense and punishment in the world beyond seriously and createdheaven and hell, and a way out was found which would lead the laboring andburdened from this vale of woe to eternal paradise. And in fact only with theprospect of a reward in the world beyond could the stoico-philonic renunci-ation of the world and ascetics be exalted to the basic moral principle of a newuniversal religion which would inspire the oppressed masses with enthusiasm.

But this heavenly paradise does not open to the faithful by the mere factof their death. We shall see that the kingdom of God, the capital of which isthe New Jerusalem, can only be conquered and opened after arduous strug-gles with the powers of hell. But in the imagination of the early Christians thesestruggles were immediately ahead. John describes his book at the very begin-ning as the revelation of “things which must shortly come to pass”; and imme-diately afterwards, I, 3, he declares “Blessed is he that readeth and they thathear the words of this prophecy . . . for the time is at hand.” To the church inPhiladelphia Christ sends the message: “Behold, I come quickly.” And in thelast chapter the angel says he has shown John “things which must shortly bedone” and gives him the order: “Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of thisbook: for the time is at hand.” And Christ himself says twice (XXII, 12, 20) “Icome quickly.” The sequel will show us how soon this coming was expected.

The visions of the Apocalypse, which the author now shows us, are copiedthroughout, and mostly literally, from earlier models, partly from the classicalprophets of the Old Testament, particularly Ezekiel, partly from later Jewishapocalypses written after the fashion of the Book of Daniel and in particularfrom the Book of Henoch which had already been written at least in part. Crit-icism has shown to the smallest details where our John got every picture,every menacing sign, every plague sent to unbelieving humanity, in a word,the whole of the material for his book; so that he not only shows great povertyof mind but even himself proves that he never experienced even in imagina-tion the alleged ecstasies and visions which he describes.

The order of these visions is briefly as follows: First John sees God sittingon his throne holding in his hand a book with seven seals and before him theLamb that has been slain and has risen from the dead (Christ) and is foundworthy to open the seals of the book. The opening of the seals is followed byall sorts of miraculous menacing signs. When the fifth seal is opened John seesunder the altar of God the souls of the martyrs of Christ that were slain forthe word of God and who cry with a loud voice saying: “How long, O Lord,dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”


And then white robes are given to them and they are told that they must restfor a little while yet, for more martyrs must be slain.

So here it is not yet a question of a “religion of love,” of “Love your ene-mies, bless them that curse you,” etc. Here undiluted revenge is preached,sound, honest revenge on the persecutors of the Christians. So it is in the wholeof the book. The nearer the crisis comes, the heavier the plagues and punish-ments rain from the heavens and with all the more satisfaction John announcesthat the mass of humanity will not atone for their sins, that new scourges ofGod must lash them, that Christ must rule them with a rod of iron and treadthe wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God, but that the impi-ous still remain obdurate in their hearts. It is the natural feeling, free of allhypocrisy, that a fight is going on and that—à la guerre comme à la guerre.

When the seventh seal is opened there come seven angels with seven trum-pets and each time one of them sounds his trumpet new horrors occur. Afterthe seventh blast seven more angels come on to the scene with the seven vialsof the wrath of God which they pour out upon the earth; still more plaguesand punishments, mainly boring repetitions of what has already happened sev-eral times. Then comes the woman, Babylon the Great Whore, sitting arrayedin scarlet over the waters, drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrsof Jesus, the great city of the seven hills that rules over all the kings of theearth. She is sitting on a beast with seven heads and ten horns. The seven headsrepresent the seven hills, and also seven “kings.” Of those kings five are fallen,one is, and the other is not yet come, and after him comes again one of thefirst five; he was wounded to death but was healed. He will reign over the worldfor 42 months or 3 1/2 years (half of a week of seven years) and will perse-cute the faithful to death and bring the rule of godlessness. But then followsthe great final fight, the saints and the martyrs are avenged by the destructionof the Great Whore Babylon and all her followers, i.e., the main mass ofmankind; the devil is cast into the bottomless pit and shut up there for a thou-sand years during which Christ reigns with the martyrs risen from the dead.But after a thousand years the devil is freed again and there is another greatbattle of the spirits in which he is finally defeated. Then follows the secondresurrection, when the other dead also arise and appear before the throne ofjudgment of God (not of Christ, be it noted) and the faithful will enter a newheaven, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem for life eternal.

As this whole monument is made up of exclusively pre-Christian Jewishmaterial it presents almost exclusively Jewish ideas. Since things started to gobadly in this world for the people of Israel, from the time of the tribute to theAssyrians and Babylonians, from the destruction of the two kingdoms of Israeland Juda to the bondage under Seleucis, that is from Isaiah to Daniel, in every


dark period there were prophecies of a saviour. In Daniel, XII, 1–3, there iseven a prophecy about Michael, the guardian angel of the Jews, coming downon earth to save them from great trouble; many dead will come to life again,there will be a kind of last judgment and the teachers who have taught thepeople justice will shine like stars for all eternity. The only Christian point isthe great stress laid on the imminent reign of Christ and the glory of the faith-ful, particularly the martyrs who have risen from the dead.

For the interpretation of these prophecies, as far as they refer to events ofthat time, we are indebted to German criticism, particularly Ewald, Lücke, andFerdinand Benary. It has been made accessible to non-theologians by Renan.We have already seen that Babylon, the Great Whore, stands for Rome, thecity of seven hills. We are told in Chapter XVII, 9–11, about the beast on whichshe sits that:

“The seven heads” of the beast “are seven mountains, on which the womansitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other isnot yet come; and when he cometh he must continue a short space. And thebeast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goethinto perdition.”

According to this the beast is Roman world domination, represented byseven caesars in succession, one of them having been mortally wounded andno longer reigning, but he will be healed and will return. It will be given untohim as the eighth to establish the kingdom of blasphemy and defiance of God.It will be given unto him “to make war with the saints and to overcomethem. . . . And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose namesare not written in the book of life of the Lamb. . . . And he causeth all, bothsmall and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their righthand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he thathad the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here iswisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, forit is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”(XIII, 7–18).

We merely note that boycott is mentioned here as one of the measures tobe applied against the Christians by the Roman Empire—and is thereforepatently an invention of the devil—and pass on to the question who thisRoman emperor is who has reigned once before, was wounded to death andremoved but will return as the eighth in the series in the role of Antichrist.

Taking Augustus as the first we have: 2. Tiberius, 3. Caligula, 4. Claudius,5. Nero, 6. Galba. “Five are fallen, and one is.” Hence, Nero is already fallenand Galba is. Galba ruled from June 9, 68 to January 15, 69. But immediatelyafter he ascended the throne the legions of the Rhine revolted under Vitellius


while other generals prepared military risings in other provinces. In Rome itselfthe praetorians rose, killed Galba and proclaimed Otho emperor.

From this we see that our Revelation was written under Galba. Probablytowards the end of his rule. Or, at the latest, during the three months (up toApril 15, 69) of the rule of Otho, “the seventh.” But who is the eighth, whowas and is not? That we learn from the number 666.

Among the Semites—Chaldeans and Jews—there was at the time a kindof magic based on the double meaning of letters. As about 300 years beforeour era Hebrew letters were also used as symbols for numbers: a = 1, b = 2,g = 3, d = 4, etc. The cabbala diviners added up the value of each letter of aname and sought from the sum to prophesy the future of the one who borethe name, e.g., by forming words or combinations of words of equal value.Secret words and the like were also expressed in this language of numbers.This art was given the Greek name gematriah, geometry; the Chaldeans, whopursued this as a business and were called mathematici by Tacitus, were laterexpelled from Rome under Claudius and again under Vitellius, presumably for“serious disorders.”

It was by means of this mathematics that our number 666 appeared. It is adisguise for the name of one of the first five caesars. But besides the number666, Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, knew another reading—616,which, at all events, appeared at a time when the number puzzle was still widelyknown. The proof of the solution will be if it holds good for both numbers.

This solution was given by Ferdinand Benary of Berlin. The name is Nero.The number is based on Neron Kesar, the Hebrew spelling of the Greek NerònKaisar, Emperor Nero, authenticated by means of the Talmud and Palmyrianinscriptions. This inscription was found on coins of Nero’s time minted in theeastern half of the empire. And so—n (nun) = 50; r (resh) = 200; v (vau) foro = 6; n (nun) = 50; k (kaph) = 100; s (samech) = 60; r (resh) = 200. Total 666.If we take as a basis the Latin spelling Nero Caesar the second nun = 50 dis-appears and we get 666 - 50 = 616, which is Irenaeus’s reading.

In fact the whole Roman Empire suddenly broke into confusion in Galba’stime. Galba himself marched on Rome at the head of the Spanish and Galliclegions to overthrow Nero, who fled and ordered an emancipated slave to killhim. But not only the praetorians in Rome plotted against Galba, the supremecommanders in the provinces did too; new pretendants to the throne appearedeverywhere and prepared to march on Rome with their legions. The empireseemed doomed to civil war, its dissolution appeared imminent. Over andabove all this the rumor spread, especially in the East, that Nero had not beenkilled but only wounded, that he had fled to the Parthians and was about toadvance with an army over the Euphrates to begin another and more bloody


rule of terror. Achaia and Asia in particular were terrified by such reports. Andat the very time at which the Revelation must have been written there appeareda false Nero who settled with a fairly considerable number of supporters notfar from Patmos and Asia Minor on the island of Kytnos in the Aegean Sea(now called Thermia), until he was killed while Otho still reigned. What wasthere to be astonished at in the fact that among the Christians, against whomNero had begun the first great persecution, the view spread that he wouldreturn as the Antichrist and that his return and the intensified attempt at abloody suppression of the new sect that it would involve would be the signand prelude of the return of Christ, of the great victorious struggle against thepowers of hell, of the thousand year kingdom “shortly” to be established, theconfident expectation of which inspired the martyrs to go joyfully to death?

Christian and Christian-influenced literature in the first two centuries givessufficient indication that the secret of the number 666 was then known tomany. Irenaeus no longer knew it, but on the other hand he and many othersup to the end of the third century also knew that the returning Nero was meantby the beast of the Apocalypse. This trace is then lost and the work which inter-ests us is fantastically interpreted by religious-minded future-tellers; I myselfas a child knew old people who, following the example of old Johann AlbrechtBengel, expected the end of the world and the last judgment in the year 1836.The prophecy was fulfilled, and to the very year. The victim of the last judg-ment, however, was not the sinful world, but the pious interpreters of the Rev-elation themselves. For in 1836 F. Benary provided the key to the number 666and thus put a torturous end to all the prophetical calculations, that newgematriah.

Our John can only give a superficial description of the kingdom of heaventhat is reserved for the faithful. The new Jerusalem is laid out on a fairly largescale, at least according to the conceptions of the time: it is 12,000 furlongsor 2,227 square kilometers, so that its area is about five million square kilo-meters, more than half the size of the United States of America. And it is builtof gold and all manner of precious stones. There God lives with his people,lightening them instead of the sun, and there shall be no more death, neithersorrow, neither shall there be any more pain. And a pure river of water of lifeflows through the city, and on either side of the river are trees of life, bearingtwelve manner of fruits and yielding fruit every month; and the leaves of thetree “serve for the healing of the nations.” (A kind of medicinal beverage,Renan thinks—L’Antechrist, p. 542.) Here the saints shall live for ever.

Such, as far as we know, was Christianity in Asia Minor, its main seat, aboutthe year 68. No trace of any Trinity but, on the contrary, the old one and indi-visible Jehovah of later Judaism which had exalted him from the national god


of the Jews to the one and supreme God of heaven and earth, where he claimsto rule over all nations, promising mercy to those who are converted and mer-cilessly smiting down the obdurate in accordance with the ancient parcere sub-jectis ac debellare superbos [pardon the humble and make war on the proud].Hence, this God, in person, not Christ as in the later accounts of the Gospelsand the Epistles, will judge at the last judgment. According to the Persian doc-trine of emanation which was current in later Judaism, Christ the Lamb pro-ceeds eternally from him as do also, but on a lower footing, the “seven spir-its of God” who owe their existence to a misunderstanding of a poetical passage(Isaiah, XI, 2). All of them are subordinate to God, not God themselves or equalto him. The Lamb sacrifices itself to atone for the sins of the world and forthat it is considerably promoted in heaven, for its voluntary death is creditedas an extraordinary feat throughout the book, not as something which pro-ceeds necessarily from its intrinsic nature. Naturally the whole heavenly courtof elders, cherubim, angels, and saints is there. In order to become a religionmonotheism has ever had to make concessions to polytheism—since the timeof the Zend-Avesta. With the Jews the decline to the sensuous gods of the hea-thens continued chronically until, after the exile, the heavenly court accord-ing to the Persian model adapted religion somewhat better to the people’s fan-tasy, and Christianity itself, even after it had replaced the eternally self-equalimmutable god of the Jews by the mysterious self-differentiating god of theTrinity, could find nothing to supplant the worship of the old gods but thatof the saints; thus, according to Fallmerayer, the worship of Jupiter in Pelo-ponnesus, Maina, and Arcadia died out only about the ninth century.(Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea, I, p. 227.) Only the modern bourgeois periodand its Protestantism did away with the saints again and at last took differen-tiated monotheism seriously.

In the book there is just as little mention of original sin and justificationby faith. The faith of these early militant communities is quite different fromthat of the later victorious church: side by side with the sacrifice of the Lamb,the imminent return of Christ and the thousand-year kingdom which is shortlyto dawn form its essential content; this faith survives only through active prop-aganda, unrelenting struggle against the internal and external enemy, the proudprofession of the revolutionary standpoint before the heathen judges and mar-tyrdom, confident in victory.

We have seen that the author is not yet aware that he is something elsethan a Jew. Accordingly there is no mention of baptism in the whole book,just as many more facts indicate that baptism was instituted in the secondperiod of Christianity. The 144,000 believing Jews are “sealed,” not baptized.It is said of the saints in heaven and the faithful upon earth that they had


washed themselves of their sins and washed their robes and made them whitein the blood of the Lamb; there is no mention of the water of baptism. Thetwo prophets who precede the coming of the Antichrist in Chapter XI do notbaptize; and according to XIX, 10, the testimony of Jesus is not baptism butthe spirit of prophecy. Baptism should naturally have been mentioned in allthese cases if it had already been in vigor; we may therefore conclude withalmost absolute certainty that the author did not know of it, that it firstappeared when the Christians finally separated from the Jews.

Neither does our author know any more about the second sacrament, theEucharist. If in the Lutheran text Christ promises all the Thyatirans that remainfirm in the faith to come das Abendmahl halten with them, this creates a falseimpression. The Greek text has deipnêsô—I shall eat supper (with him), andthe English Bible translates this correctly: I shall sup with him. There is no ques-tion here of the Eucharist even as a mere commemoration meal.

There can be no doubt that this book, with its date so originally authen-ticated as the year 68 or 69, is the oldest of all Christian literature. No otheris written in such barbaric language, so full of Hebraisms, impossible con-structions, and mistakes in grammar. Chapter I, verse 4, for example, says lit-erally: “Grace be unto you . . . from he that is being and that was and that iscoming.” Only professional theologians and other historians who have a stakein it now deny that the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are but later adap-tations of writings which are now lost and whose feeble historical core is nowunrecognizable in the maze of legend, that even the few Epistles supposed byBruno Bauer to be “authentic” are either writings of a later date or at best adap-tations of old works of unknown authors altered by additions and insertions.It is all the more important since we are here in possession of a book whosedate of writing has been determined to the nearest month, a book that dis-plays to us Christianity in its undeveloped form. This form stands in the samerelation to the fourth century state religion with its fully evolved dogma andmythology as Tacitus’s still unstable mythology of the Germans to the devel-oped teaching of the gods of Edda as influenced by Christian and antique ele-ments. The core of the universal religion is there, but it includes without anydiscrimination the thousand possibilities of development which became real-ities in the countless subsequent sects. And the reason why this oldest writ-ing of the time when Christianity was coming into being is especially valuablefor us is that it shows without any dilution what Judaism, strongly influencedby Alexandria, contributed to Christianity. All that comes later is western,Greco-Roman addition. It was only by the intermediary of the monotheisticJewish religion that the cultured monotheism of later Greek vulgar philoso-phy could clothe itself in the religious form in which alone it could grip the


masses. But once this intermediary found, it could become a universal reli-gion only in the Greco-Roman world, and that by further development in andmerging with the thought material that world had achieved.

P E R S O N A L L E T T E R S

LETTER FROM JENNY MARX TO JOHANN PHILIPP BECKER (1866)

This letter is included here not only for its own intrinsic interest, but alsobecause it shows that in intellectual, political, and spiritual matters Mrs.Marx shared her husband’s opinions.

London, ca. January 29, 1866

My Dear Herr Becker:

For a week now my husband has again been stricken with the dangerousand extremely painful illness [carbuncles]. . . .

In religious matters there is now a significant movement in this dank Eng-land. The foremost men of science, headed by Huxley (Darwin’s follower), withTyndall, Sir Charles Lyell, Bowring, Carpenter, etc., etc., gave in St. MartinsHall (of the glorious waltz-commemoration1) extremely enlightened, trulyfree-thinking and audacious lectures for the people, and on Sunday eveningsat that, precisely at the hour when ordinarily the little sheep used to go to thepasture of the Lord. The Hall was so jammed and the jubilation of the peopleso great that, on the first Sunday evening when I went there with my girls,2,000 people could not get into the place, which was already filled to suffo-cation. Three times the parsons let this [to them] dreadful occurrence [the lec-tures] happen. But last night [Sunday] the audience was informed that no morelectures would be allowed until the lawsuit of the parsons against the “Sun-day evenings for the people” had been settled. The indignation of the assem-blage expressed itself decisively, and more than £100 was collected for defenseagainst the lawsuit. How stupid of the little parsons to meddle in this! To theanger of that gang, the evenings ended with music. Choruses sang Handel,Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Gounod, and were received with enthu-siasm by the English, who had hitherto only been allowed to bawl “Jesus, Meekand Mild” or to wander into the gin palaces.

Karl, who lies in great pain, and my girls send you their hearty regards;the little one [Eleanor] especially sends much friendliness to the “good Becker.”But I, from a distance, extend my hand to you.

Personal Letters 237

Yours,

Jenny Marx

LETTER FROM KARL MARX TO FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1864)

Zaltbommel, Holland, January 20, 1864

Dear Frederick:

You see, I am still here, and “I will tell you more,” I am in fact incapableto move about. This is a perfidious Christian illness. When I received yourletter I was congratulating myself on the healing of the old wounds, but thesame evening a big furuncle broke out on my left chest under the neck, andan antipodal one in the back. Although painful, that at least did not preventme from walking, which I did, in fact, across the Rhine (Waal), in companywith my uncle and cousin. But a few days later another carbuncle broke outon my right leg, directly under the spot to which Goethe refers: And whenthe nobleman has no posterior, how can he sit? This is the most painful of theknown abscesses that I have ever had, and I hope it will finally terminate theseries. In the meantime, I can neither walk, nor stand, nor sit, and even lyingdown is damned hard. You see, mon cher, how the wisdom of nature hasafflicted me. Would it not have been more sensible if, instead of me, it hadbeen consigned to try the patience of a good Christian, a person, say, of thestripe of Silvio Pellico? Besides the carbuncle on the posterior, you shouldknow that a new furuncle has broken out on the back, and the one on thechest is only beginning to heal, so that like a true Lazarus (alias Lassalle), Iam scourged on all sides.

Apropos Lazarus, I like Renan’s Life of Jesus, which is in some respects mereromance, full of pantheistic-mystical giddiness. Still, the book has some advan-tages over its German predecessors, and it is not bulky; you must read it. Itis, of course, a result of German research. Highly remarkable: here in Hollandthe German critical-theological tendency is so very much à l’ordre de jour [theorder of the day] that the preachers acknowledge it openly from the pul-pits. . . .

I am writing only these few lines, and even that is done with great effort,since sitting is painful. But I expect a return answer from you; it cheers me upto see your handwriting.

Don’t forget to enclose a photograph. I have promised it to my cousin, andhow could she believe in our Orestes-Pylades friendship if I could not com-


movere [move] you even to send a photograph? My address as before: c/o L.Philips. Salut to you and Lupus.

Your

K. M.

LETTER FROM KARL MARX TO FERDINAND DOMELA NIEUWENHUIS

London, February 22, 1881

Honored Party Comrade:

. . . The doctrinal and necessarily illusory anticipation of the action pro-gram of a revolution of the future emerges only from contemporary struggle.The dream of the imminent destruction of the world inspired the early Chris-tians in their struggle with the Roman world empire and gave them a certaintyof victory. Scientific insight into the unavoidable and continuing disintegra-tion of the dominant order of society . . . serves as a guarantee that at themoment of outbreak of a real proletarian revolution its very conditions . . . willdirectly bring forth the next modus operandi.

Your most devoted

Karl Marx

NOTE

1. The ball that commemorated the founding of the First International, September 28,1865, in St. Martins Hall.

Personal Letters 239

PART I

1. Why did Marx turn his curiosity from Romantic poetry to the philosophyof Hegel and Feuerbach and, finally, to the economic writings of JohnLocke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo? What was his longing, his passion?

2. What is the complaint Marx brings not just to Judaism but to religion ingeneral? What was religion doing and not doing in Germany and GreatBritain in the early years of the 19th century?

PART II

1. Why did our species evolve a highly self-reflective kind of consciousness?How did the neocortex, the opposable thumb, and the human use of toolshelp us establish our species’ specific way of survival?

2. What does Marx mean by “sensuous life activity”? Why does he disagreewith Hegel? Why does Marx insist that the purpose of human life is “tochange,” not just to understand the world in various ways?

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Study Guide for Students

3. What does Marx do with the idea of freedom if consciousness merelyreflects (passively) the given realities of the material world? Without free-dom to reflect critically and to act on that reflection, how can we changethe world?

PART III

1. What does Marx mean by “free conscious life activity”? What is thenature and purpose of human work? Isn’t work good if it pays a goodincome and is secure?

2. If Marx is right, why do so many workers today experience their workunder democratic capitalism as not “estranged” but satisfying? Why did theimpoverishment of workers anticipated by Marx not happen?

3. What are the effects (both good and ill) of global capitalism upon peo-ple’s lives: In older industrial countries? In the newly developing countries?3. What is the human score card on work at the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury?

4. What for Marx would be good work? What would make it good? Whatwould be its distinguishing characteristics?

PART IV

1. What does Marx mean by “the opium of the masses”? Besides consolationin face of injury and loss, can religion be a source of resistance and socialchange? If so, what did Marx miss in his analysis of religion?

2. What did both Marx and Engels find interesting in the religious idea ofthe messiah and of the messianic vision?

3. What did Marx mean when he said, “the more of himself man gives toGod the less he has left in himself”? What does he mean by claiming thatreligion is “an inverted consciousness”?

4. What would Marx or Engels make of the civil rights movement of the1960s, in which the churches and the clergy seemed to play a leading role,first in resisting and then in transforming a legally segregated society?

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marx on religion

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